The bankruptcy of Thomas Cook & Son Ltd. reminds us of one of their ventures during World War II. During the war, postal service between warring nations was suspended, but the British government was willing to allow families to remain in touch with relatives in Germany or occupied countries. Therefore, they allowed Thomas Cook to provide an “undercover mail” service via neutral Lisbon.

Writers in Britain would write their letter and place it in an unsealed envelope addressed to the eventual recipient. The letter would instruct the recipient to reply to the sender’s full name, care of Post Office Box 506, Lisbon, Portugal.

This envelope was placed in an outer envelope along with a money order for 2 shillings, along with a note of the sender’s full name and address. This was all sent to Thos. Cook & Son Ltd., Berkley Street, Piccadilly, London.

Letters were subject to censorship, and subject to numerous rules. They were to be clearly written without erasures, and could not exceed two sides of a normal sheet of notepaper. The sender’s address was not to be used in the letter or envelope and were to refer only to matters of personal interest. There was to be no reference to any town (other than Lisbon), village, locality, ship, or journey. There was to be mo mention of the fact that the writer was not in Portugal.

Box 506 was the most famous of these addresses, although there were others at various times during the war. Prior to the U.S. entry into the war, undercover addresses in New York were used by Canadians and aliens stuck in Canada to correspond with Germany and occupied countries.

References:

• Rudolf Hess: A New Technical Analysis of the Hess Flight, May 1941
• Undercover Addresses of World War II

Forged envelopes and stamps, courtesy of CIA website.

Seventy years ago today, January 5, 1945, Allied bombers engaged in an unusual attack. They bombed a mail train heading for Linz, Austria. The train was derailed, and mail was scattered around the area. More bombers then arrived and dropped mail bags appearing for all the world to be genuine Reichspost bags. Inside were about 3800 letters addressed to Germans, many of whom were the families of German soldiers who had been killed in action.

The plan was known as Operation Cornflakes. The return addresses on the letters were those of German firms, and the letters outwardly appeared to be normal business correspondence. However, the envelopes contained propaganda newspapers prepared by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), including issues of Das Neue Deutschland, an example of which is shown below.

The stamps, envelopes, and even the mail bags, had to be carefully forged to appear original to the postal workers who would handle them. While the program had no discernible effect, it was successful in that most of the propaganda letters were introduced into the German mails. After the train was bombed, German rail and postal workers dutifully picked up the scattered mail bags and sent them onward to their intended recipients.

The stamps and envelopes shown above are examples of some of the forgeries, courtesy of the CIA website. To ensure that the propaganda would blend in with the normal mail, the OSS consulted German POW’s who had worked for the post office. The details of the cancellations had to match what was in use in the cities from which the mail had purportedly originated, and there had to be some semblance of mail being in the proper train for the town for which it was intended. German POW’s provided most of this information relating to the internal workings of the German mails.

Most of the mail was successfully delivered, but in one case, a sharp-eyed German postal worker noticed that the name of the company was misspelled on the return address. This, of course, resulted in that particular batch not being delivered.

References

• Operation Cornflakes: How the Allies went postal in the secret propaganda war against the Nazis
• Operation Cornflakes at Wikipedia
• Operational History of Das Neue Deutschland
• Postal Forgeries in Two World Wars at cia.gov

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