Germania Identification Aid

Germany's Germania issues of 1900-1922 can, at first glance, be a real pain to identify. To help in this regard, I've put together a little tool that allows you to filter the Germania issues by face value, watermark, and type, to narrow down the potential catalog numbers.

Give it a try here.

As it's early in the development, there are a couple in-work items --

(1) A handful of the photos are representatives, not actuals -- meaning, if two catalog numbers (say, #68 and #83) are identical except for the watermark, they may have the same photo (in this case, #68). I have photos of most of the actual issues, but they're on a boat to the Azores at the moment, so I had to make do with what's available on the Internet.

(2) I'm working on adding the larger issues, and some more specialized items. There are a lot of minor variations, and I may eventually add them all, but for now it's just the basics to get you in the ballpark.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Thanks for this, mighty helpful. I collect Germany only as it relates to Poland. For the Germania issues this includes - used in Poland, Russisch-Polen, Gen-Gouv Warschau, Postgebiet Ob-Ost, Poczta-Polska, Allenstein, Marienwerder, & Danzig. Just this lot keeps me quite busy.

By a coincidence my latest purchase has been the Poland 1919 Poznan10f with inverted overprint!



For those who aren't familiar with this area only the 5f is known with inverted overprint & is very rare, the 10f inverted doesn't exist, but for 99 cents on ebay, I coudn't resist

Fabulous resource PostmasterGS

It will be a great help to me to identify these Germania's I just received:

I assume the catalog number is Michel?

Yes, Michel. Scott's a hot mess with these issues, and as much as I've tried, I can't decipher what they're doing.

I like your site, Postmaster! I've got all the Germania's as listed by Scott (major numbers), so I probably won't need to use the identifier, but I like the rest of your site.

Scott is really a horrible catalog for Germany and for most European issues. Germany is my main area of focus right now and I do use Scott, but the way it's organized for Germany is just...not ideal. My biggest pet peeve is listing the semipostals separately. The paging back and forth is most aggravating. It's also quite aggravating to have various parts of German Philately scattered amongst all six volumes, amongst other quibbles I have with their layout.

I'll probably break down and get Michel Germany Specialized at some point but have thus far resisted because 1) I know almost no German and 2) my album is organized by Scott (although rearranged somewhat so it makes more sense historically). If/when I ever get to the point where I want to specialize a bit, I know a Michel Catalog (even if it's in German) will be a necessity.

bump! Just found this and it is very helpful. Thank you so much.

Glad you found it useful. I'm probably going to make some additions to it soon — color varieties, larger-value Germanias, and maybe Scott numbers.

Yes thank you for it. The Scott Numbers have a changed a bit, but that is OK. I was able to narrow my focus to the year or type in the Scott Catalogue. Scott is atrocious for these things. All over the place for classification and not a lot of help.

I've now finished adding the remainder of the major varieties of Germania issues to the Germania Identification Aid. I also did my best to add Scott numbers, though I'm not 100% sure they're all accurate, as some can be difficult to match to Michel.