There are a couple of things that are interesting about this stamp, which appears to be Scott 186, a three mark red definitive from 1922, just before the hyperinflation which devastated Germany's economy. Within a very short time after this stamp was issued, values of just a few marks were being replaced with ones of ever increasingly high numbers: hundreds, thousands, millions and even billions of marks. And the first thing that is interesting about this stamp, and the hyperinflation issues that soon followed is that genuinely used examples (as this one appears to be) are worth more than mint examples, in some cases many hundreds of times as much. This one catalogues for 25 cents mint and $1.50 used The second interesting thing is the "perfin" (short for perforated initials) of HB. These were theft prevention measures used in many countries (including the United States.) They were used mostly by governmental agencies and large companies that sent out a lot of mail. They would puncture the stamps with a distinctive pattern, often a company logo or set of initials to show that the stamps were authorized to be used only by that particular entity. If the stamps were found to have been used by others, then the stamps must have been stolen, and the user could then be sought out and possibly be prosecuted. My guess (there are catalogues for these sorts of things) is that the perfin might have been used by the Hofbrau brewery, which uses HB as its logo on its beer bottles. Does anyone know for sure? I have a section in my Denmark collection for perfins, including about 30 examples with my own initials which I found out is for a bank in Denmark.
Thanks for the info, everyone! And, waddsbadds, that's really interesting information! I have a ton of German stamps, I'll have to take a look through them to check out the face value. And from now on I'll keep an eye out for perfs, too.
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