Luftfahrerdank --1914 German Aviation Fundraising Stamps

Finally got my LUFTFAHRERDANK stamps mounted . I started with a Google explanation of what they served a purpose for .

There are some miss understanding of how many there are, I seen two sources saying there are 25 different and one source say as many as 120 stamps .I believe the number is greater than 25 because I have 26 different pictures . The large number may be talking about shades or color tones . As you can see I have two clearly different color shades . I even put the different colors next to each other to show the difference .It makes no sense to me to have different color shades on separate scans .
All the different stamps that I been watching on ebay have been stamps I already have ,so if others exist they just don't show up and may be limited printings .

Nice post.
Fascinating.

floortrader,

According to Charles Kiddle in his Poster Stamps / German Aviation / German Aircraft, these were released in sheets of 25. There were probably five different sheets. Due to some duplication among the stamps within the sheets, there are at least 101 known stamps. There were also 8 different color shades, though not all stamps were found in all shades. Safe to say the varieties are very numerous.

It is very possible that the pictures with the Flugwoche description were taken at the Berlin Johannistal airfield. I have a box with glas slides of the 1913 flugwoche at Johannistal. I will take a look and compare with the pictures on the stamps. (i have to be honoust, I do have to find the box first)

PostmasterGS

Thanks for the additional information ,on Charles Kiddle catalog and your info on the various sheets . Sounds like some of the shades are hard to detect without same scan to see some of the varitations . I posted the gray-green shade and the tan/beige shade and their must be finer breakdowns to those two colors like a gray and black and other shades .
I can understand most people would get one shade and move on . Hope this page will bring new comments on these stamps and also bring new collectors thru a Google search now that this page is searchable .

Just a side note ---On the third scan above ,the first row looks like there are four different shades on that top row . So searching and buying any of these on line would be most difficult to get the right shade if your collecting them .

floortrader,

I misread something in the catalog. There are two Luftfahrerdank types -- those you show above with "WOHLFAHRTSMARKE" at the bottom, and a later series with text that varies depending on the subject of the stamp. There appear to be 37 of the Wohlfahrtsmarke type (not counting color varieties), with numbers 38-101 being the later type.

If you'd like the detailed info from Kiddle, shoot me your e-mail address -- mine is postmaster -at- the name of my website.