Zeppelin Card From Russia (Or...)

This must be the most intriguing card I have. I tried to find out more about it, and can add that here, but I want to show it here first and maybe some of you have interesting details to share?

Great Card...I love the stamps affixed

Leningrad to Munich via Graf Zeppelin...
Now that's cool!


At least that is what it appears, I only know enough
of those words though to get me in trouble!

Do any of those words signify this is a first flight?
There are quite a few words there in the canceling that
appear to be slogans...

15, Sept. 1930....

Isn't Moskau an alternate spelling of Moskow ?


Wonderful card.....wish it were mine.

IMHO, anything Zepp related is, by default, great material. I don't have much in my collection though. That's as good as I've seen!

its a beauty.

the stamp is interesting. there is a 5 in the corner and a worker holding a 4 next to the russian word year. so it means 5 years in 4.
a bunch of workers building and pointing to the zep. I wonder what year it is? it looks like the stamp is trying to get russia to build its own airship in 4 years.

moskau is the german spelling of moscow. so it must have gone through there.

almost correct, it signifies the call to complete the five-year plan in four years. As you may remember, the Soviet-economy was very much into these five-year plans, as an alternative to open market economies where the market decided what would happen.

The stamps were issued to commemorate the returnflight from Friedrichshafen (in southern Germany) to Moscow, the socalled Russlandfahrt. The stamps are Russia C12b and C13b.

The cancels are interesting, for many reasons. The triangular red one is to show that it was on the Graf Zeppelin. The only problem is that it should not be on this card, as it is a German cancel that was applied to mail leaving Germany to Russia. It could not have been placed on the card in Moscow or Leningrad. Apart from that, it has the wrong size and shape.
The green cancel with Leningrad is even stranger. The Graf Zeppelin left Friedrichshafen at September 9th, arrived in Moscow 26 hours later and left the same day, back to Germany where it arrived on the 11th, 21 hours after leaving Moscow again. How it could have been cancelled in Leningrad four days later is a mystery. Even more so because it was cancelled with a postmark made for the Polar flight that took place a year later...
The blue cancel should say it went by airship from Moscow to Friedrichshafen. It is also wrong, too small and it should be in lower case, not all upper case lettering.
The cancels used on the stamps also have mistakes, but they are of a kind only specialists would notice.

Finally these stamps. They are forgeries as well. I have heard it from experts who looked at this card, but I have also seen it with my own eyes. The real C12 and C13 look very, very different. They have far more detail and brighter colours. In short, they look much better than these two, so if you like these, try to find the real thing.

Conclusion: someone has done a lot of work making this. Probably the only thing that is real is the card itself. I find it strange to see that so much effort was put into it, and yet, so many mistakes were made that no serious Russia or Zeppelin collector would even think for a minute it is real.
But it still is a nice piece. :)

Here is a real card that went from Russia to Friedrichshafen. Note how different the stamp looks and also interesting to see the receiving postmark from Friedrichshafen: 11 9 1930.



(This card is not mine, by the way)

Jan-Simon......


Great information.....I would never have guessed that the first card was a bogus item.

thanks.
If you compare these two cards, the old saying 'if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't ' applies here. Too many fancy cancels...
The funny thing is that the tendency too make it even more beautiful has backfired here. The Leningrad cancel gives it all away to the experts. When I showed it to someone who knows a lot more than I do about this stuff, that was the first thing he said: "That cancel should not be there, this is a complete fake"