PROLOGUE
I continue my work of treating postal history during and the following years of the Second World War with my second book.
Why is censorship the theme of this book?
In my previous book I outlined the world of censorship in Hungary, but because of the breadth of this topic, I just managed to produce only an introduction. Yet the topic deserves a more extensive and detailed adaptation. It goes without saying that no one has treated this topic so broadly and deeply in the last 70 years. Short articles have been published, but - as you can see in the bibliography – there are very few of them. In Germany many books have been published in connection with Second World War censorship, the last one in 2008. This was a 450-page, A4-format compilation of Mr. HORST LANDSMANN. Since the publication of the book, 11 supplements have been published.
I was inspired to write my book by another fellow collector. In connection with the PEKIR censorship of field deliveries, the fellow collector asked for help to gather numbering stamp of the censor officers. As I revised my collection, I was surprised to find that very few PEKIR censor marks can be found on the deliveries. I looked through the civil deliveries as well and I found only a few with Hungarian censor marks, yet almost all of them had German ones.
This spurred me to look into the Hungarian censorship of the era. This is how this book was born.
I divided my book in to two distinct parts: open censorship during and after the war. They are easily distinguished in terms of period, time and the designation of censorship, although these overlap each other in time.
You can rightfully ask why I didn’t write two books about these two separate censorship periods. The reason is both prosaic and practical. In my opinion, despite the censorship periods being well separable, they are closely connected. The prosaic reason is that open censorship after the war is much more modest; it wouldn’t have completed an independent volume. Moreover, practicality suggests that it is easier for the collectors to find all they need to know in connection with the open censorship of the period in one volume.
Because this is a pioneering work, some mistakes or disproportions in evaluation may occur.
No matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to gather all of the censor marks and stamps, therefore it is certain that there are censor marks and stamps that don’t appear in the book. If someone has this kind of delivery in their collection, please share it with me on the email address
So, I can make it a public domain on the website
and also to implement and specify this book.
Budapest, 07-28-2014