Censorship Project Started Material Sources Needed

These are both hand written folded letters with printed instructions, during the war, 43 and 44, with stamps.

Thanks revcollector. If it suits you, maybe you can send a copy to the Israeli holocaust museum "Yad Vashem", or if they offer a reasonable price...

I am not interested in selling them, and there are a number of similar examples around, so I would think that they have some already. My main interest in this area is Holocaust Perpetrators, and I have some items of both postal history and revenue usages which I suspect are much less common.

I just read an article on postal censorship but cannot find the original.

A google search yielded this,

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/03...stitutional/

Angore - Thank you so much! That info is great and fits in well with what I am looking for.

I just saw Don's request about USPOD laws/regulations. A quick glance shows this to be a considerable task beyond my current time availability. An index entry for "Obscene" appears in the periodic "Postal Law and Regulations" volumes for 1866 (pre-Comstock), 1873, in 1879 (citing revised statutes 3894 as amended by act of July 12, 1876, 19 stat, p.90), in 1887, etc. One could no doubt follow along the exact dates of the PL&R changes in the "Postal Bulletins". The "Unmailable" volume cited in my last post here has extensive references to the exact Congressional act numbers.

The challenge for the postal historian is to find something which actually passed through the mails which should not have, or better yet got caught by the USPOD and got marked and preserved with its contents. The various laws and regulations prevented a most of this happening, thus the collectible for us today was never created.

You may find these reviews of interest (I think you can probably read one without being a subscriber - although you may surprise and delight me by telling me that you already are. )

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/20...c-berkowitz/

The second is more about customs.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/20...es-on-trial/

rogdcam this is in my collection...I never heard about the outcome.

Normandy - Interesting. The year, 1937, offers up a few possibilities about what the Country involved may have been. Is there anything that could give a clue as to what the prohibited content was?

No there was nothing else in the envelop, it had been sent to my Grandfather.
He worked in a bank at that time but that was sent to his home and I haven't seen in the collection that would explain it.

There were countries such as Germany which were prohibiting certain people such as Jews from sending money out of the country before it could be confiscated. Since he worked in a bank.........

"If the contents are as supposed" - i.e., we already steamed it open and we don't like the contents. Could be anything really - from politics to Henry Miller.

I was thinking Germany as well, he was German American and I have seen older (non third reich) German stamps with in the collection.
My Grandfather was a proud US WWI Veteran so he may have just purchased some stamps and the country of origin caught someones eye.
I never heard anything from family about the incident.

Postal guides discussed prohibited matter, country by country.

Edit: May be something as simple as a lottery ticket.