Saturday, June 30, 2018

KdF Wagen Revenue Stamps


I can't believe I had an opportunity to buy a filled KdF Wagen stamp savings box at the Vienna Naschmarkt years ago and passed because I was too cheap. Below is a description of this pane of stamps.

KdF Wagen savings
stamps.  

To help finance the war effort and to encourage the German people to save for an automobile, people were encouraged to purchase these stamps from their pay and to put them in a savings booklet.  Once the booklet was full of stamps as required, the Germans would trade the VW savings card in for a new Volkswagen.  Since Germany lost the war, no cars were actually delivered under this program.  
Kraft durch Freude (German for Strength through Joy, abbreviated KdF) was a large state-operated leisure organization in National Socialism Germany. ] It was a part of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), the national German labour organization at that time. Set up as a tool to promote the advantages of National Socialism to the people, it soon became the world's largest tourism operator of the 1930s.
Another less ideological goal was to boost the German economy by stimulating the tourist industry out of its slump from the 1920s. It was quite successful up until the outbreak of World War II. By 1934, over two million Germans had participated on a KdF trip; by 1939 the reported numbers lay around 25 million people. The organization essentially collapsed in 1939, and several projects, such as the massive Prora holiday resort, were never completed.



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