History and Background

What exactly is Oberpostdirektion ?
During the period of Germany's hyper-inflation, (24 August- 1 December 1923) the printing of stamps was initially done by the State printers, (Reichsdruckerei) in Berlin. At first older invalid stamps had to be overprinted to meet the ever increasing postal rates. But by the end of August 1923 the Reichsdruckerei could not cope with the demand and therefor authorized 11 regional directorates of post ,(Oberpostdirektion) to carry out local overprinting of stamps. Berlin supplied all the older stamp sheets which were to be overprinted and the cliche overprinting plates. This was meant to provide a uniform printing from each of the OPD's. The set up though varied from each OPD and specialists can identify from certain characteristics which stamps were issued by the the various OPD's.

The eleven OPD districts were, Breslau, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hannover, Königsberg, Leipzig, München, Münster, Stettin and Stuttgart. It is worth noting that not all the OPD's produced each of the new values.

The first OPD issues appeared on 20 September, 1923. In late November 1923 a nine day strike at the Reicksdruckerei saw the OPD's called upon again to overprint the new Rosette design stamps to meet the demand for postage stamps. The Rosette design stamps with new values and not overprinted had only started to appear mid October and by mid November these also had to be overprinted to meet spiraling postage rate increases. All Rosette design stamps overprinted with the new value are OPD issues, commonly refered to as the 2nd OPD Issue. These take the form of seven more stamps being overprinted yet producing only three new stamp values the 1 ,5 and 10 Milliarden Marks. The latter two are known to be with normal and rouletted perforations.