Canadian Mail Censored In The US During WW2

I asked this in the Canadian forum a couple of weeks ago and have had no reply so I will try here.

It is not uncommon to find mail from Canada addressed to the USA during WW2 that was not censored in Canada (due to pressure of work)but was then censored in the US. It could well be that uncensored mail attracted the US censors attention more than censored mail.

However what I have never seen is mail addressed to America that was censored in BOTH Canada and the US. Has anyone seen such mail.

AQ

***Requested edit by Mod***

None to my knowledge.

There should not have been many reasons why mail to the US should go through Canada to begin with. I'm sure some did, but I don't imagine that if the Canadians let it through that the US censors were going to bother looking too. It's not like they did not have enough to look at already.

revcollector

I did not mean mail going through Canada but mail from Canada to the US. I realise that the censors were sometimes overloaded which was why uncensored was sometimes allowed to the US.

It is just doubled censored mail from Canada to the US I am trying to find

AQ

I've never seen any, but anything is possible. I do not see any need for such double censoring given the British Commonwealth countries were allies of the US so it does not really make sense to me. I am sure there must have been a bit of spying and subversion going on in Canada during the war but I would imagine it would not have been as dire a threat as mail from so called neutral countries or even countries with leanings towards the Axis countries. Have you seen examples of such doubly censored mail from Canada to the US or read about it somewhere? Can you think of a reason why such double censoring would be necessary?

There are double censored covers between British Commonwealth countries and the U.S.. I've seen them between Australia to U.S. and India to U.S. as well as a few others.

I suspect that had a lot to do with what route they took.

I'll start with a request for clarification. The original post (OP) stated "Canada addressed to the USA during WW2 that was not cancelled in Canada". Did you mean "censored" rather than "cancelled"? My response below is made assuming that you meant "censored".

The following is a generalized statement of civil censorship practices. I have casually collected some US and Mexican censorship covers from both WW1 and WW2 for a few years, but I am by no means an expert.

Most countries used two schemes to select mail for censorship.

The first was based on "must censor" lists which were maintained with names of businesses and individuals whose correspondences were to be censored at any time they were encountered. These lists were compiled from various sources, and distributed to all censorship stations within that country.

The second was a random selection of some percentage of the mail which passed through a censorship office, which was in many cases based on the mail volume and the resources available to censor that mail. It was impractical to select out for censorship more mail received in one day than could be censored in that same period. There was a necessity to not have mail delayed for days on end with a large backlog.

So for a possible scenario for the OP's original question, consider the following: A letter mailed in Canada was mailed by or to a name on the Canadian "must censor" list. It is intercepted and censored. It then goes to the United States, where it is found on a similar American "must censor" list, and is censored again.

I believe that each country's censorship office would operate independently of other countries. Just because some prior country censor station examined the letter does not insure that the contents are of no interest to the next country.

I would suspect that this scenario was quite common, although between Allies, it would be less common than mail to neutral or belligerent nations through neutral countries. I have seen examples of 3 and more different country's "censorship" on a single letter. I read somewhere that seven is the "record".

The above is my "impression", and not based on official documents or sources. If someone can provide official records to refute or expand on the above, please do so.

I have posted a copy of this OP on the Civil Censorship Study Group forum (a members only forum), and will reflect any responses back here.

Mike

Mike

Sorry I need to proof read better. I did mean censored in the O.P. I will edit it if it is possible now. I am a member of the CCSG but the forum does not seem very active so I posted here.

Like you I have seen double and tripled censored letters to varoius countries but no one I have spoken to has seen letters from Canada, addressed to the US that were censored in both Canada and the US. I found this slightly surprising and wondered if it was really so. If such covers do exist I will try to find one for my collection.

AQ

The only double and triple censored covers and letters I have seen from WW2 are due to their complicated routings through more than one intermediate country and often carried by several carriers rather than ones that are simple one carrier routings. I suppose there could be some cases where there was double censoring but there would have to be a very specific reason for it as it cost time and money to censor and doing it for no reason does not make sense.

Kimo

Each country has its own criteria for censoring mails. Because one country censored a letter does not mean a second or third country would not want to. They might be interested in the same "information."

Here is a triple censored cover from an internee at the Estacion Migratoria Internment Camp at Perote, VER, Mexico. This camp housed German and Italian sailors who were stranded in Mexico when the British blockaded Mexican ports in the early days of WW2. Mexico was neutral during 1940 and 1941 until June 1942, and was a major exporter of oil to Germany..

Mexico examined virtually all mail from these internment camps. The Mexico Label with Examiner 505 is typical of this censorship after April 1943.

It then went via Bermuda and was examined by Examiner 4397. I don't know what their motivation might have been, but it was probably based on the fact that it was from a German internee in Mexico.

Finally the letter was censored by the Germans in their Paris censorship office before the final trip to Geneva and the International Red Cross. The Germans were very inconsistent in censoring this mail, probably only about 25% of the covers I have examined were censored by the German office. I suspect they cared less about incoming mail than the outgoing mail.

Front:



Reverse:

That is an interesting example from Mexico. As you point out, though, it is something of a very special interest case where Mexico, which was eventually on the side of the Allies and actually had a few hundred troops in the war. Depending on the month and year and the status of the war, the main way for a letter to get from a German was in Mexico when Mexico declared to be on the side of the Allies and rounded up the German and Italian soldiers and sailors who happened to be there at the time to the Red Cross in Switzerland was to go through the British mails that were being censored at Bermuda and then through one of the European countries that was occupied by the Germans. As such a cover would be expected to be censored by the Mexicans, the British and the Germans who all would be suspicious of any mails passing through their hands and would likely want to take a look inside. This is different from a letter being sent by an ordinary Canadian citizen to an ordinary American citizen at the same time where the only postal authorities would have been the Canadians and the Americans and where there would be no special circumstances such as the sender being a war prisoner.

Kimo:

I hope that my initial post was not misleading.

The routing of this Mexican Internment Camp Mail was primarily done via New York and not Bermuda. Most of the covers I have recorded (about 150 at this time) went from the Camps to Mexico City, then by Air to New York, where they were censored by censorship staff who were assigned to examine POW and Internee mail. These examiners were assigned numbers from the ranges 117-352, 533-738, 1120-1150, and 12057-12994. (These numbers taken from Broderick & Mayo, Civil Censorship in the United States during World War II, page 32)

It appears that there were specific Examiners identified who were responsible for this Mexican Internee mail, as I see the same small group of Examiner numbers on most of this mail.

They then went by Clipper to Lisbon Portugal, where they were dispatched by train to Paris. The Germans censored this mail at Paris during February and March 1944. The German censorship stopped during April, then began again in May, but this mail was shipped to Berlin for censorship there. After being censored at Paris or Berlin, the mail was routed by train to the International Red Cross in Geneva.

When Paris was returned to Allied control at the end of July, German Censorship stopped.

Here is a typical cover that went via New York.

Cover front. The US censor tape is seen at the left. The Examiner no. 12086 is seen on the tape in green ink, with "U.S. Censor" below.



By this point in time, the US censor tapes did not have preprinted numbers. It appears they used a wide version of "Scotch" tape, and had individual hand stamps which applied the examiner numbers.



Cover reverse:



[

Thanks for the clarification. In your initial explanation of the POW letter you mentioned that the censor tape 4397 was from Bermuda rather than New York which is why I was thinking it would have gone by British flying boat via Bermuda and get that censoring there. In any case, whether it is Bermuda or New York or both a German prisoner of war's letter going through a number of different countries controlled by different armies would in my eyes be expected to get multiple censorings along the way. That would be a special case compared to a simple letter going from an ordinary Canadian citizen or business to an ordinary American citizen or business where a single censoring by the Canadian censors would likely have been enough censoring.

That was my original thought. Some mail was censored in Canada, some in the US and some not all all. I just wondered if any double censored mail existed. My feeling now is that it does not or if it does it is very rare.

AQ