HJ Postsparkarte – Deutsche Reichspost – Postal Savings of the Hitler Youth – “Deutsche Reichspost – Postsparen der Hitler-Jugend.” A postal service savings card of the Reich – Hitler Youth postal savings (Hitler-Jugend Postsparkarte), used as a savings program for children and youth in Nazi Germany in cooperation with the German postal service (Deutsche Reichspost), intended for members of the Nazi youth movement – the Hitlerjugend.
On the front, the emblem of the Hitlerjugend – the Hitler Youth, appears: a triangle with a swastika in red, black, and white. At the bottom appears:
HJ-Postsparkarten (für 3 Reichsmark) – Hitler Youth savings card, for 3 Reichsmark. On the booklet’s pages, 32 stamps of the German Reich are affixed, in various denominations, most bearing the portrait of Adolf Hitler, and some featuring Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. The stamps appear in various colors – green, brown, purple – and are cancelled with the postal mark “TROFAIACH”, a town in Austria.
The purpose of the booklet was to promote the idea of the Führer’s supremacy among children through a savings method: the child would paste stamps into the booklet as part of postal savings deposits. Once completed, the booklet could be exchanged for money or used as a kind of cash-equivalent deposit. On the reverse of the card it is written: “To be deposited at the post office branch and sent to the Postal Savings Bank branch in Vienna…”.
Educational initiatives such as the Hitler Youth savings cards were part of a systematic and sophisticated apparatus aimed at shaping the consciousness of youth in the Third Reich. Saving through stamps bearing Hitler’s portrait was not merely an economic act, but first and foremost a covert means of instilling the image of the Führer as a national and social role model for admiration. Every daily action – even one as seemingly simple as affixing a stamp – became a ritual of loyalty to the Reich and its leader. Through such practices, children and adolescents were indoctrinated with values of obedience, thrift, and devotion to the leader. Consumer acts (such as saving) were imbued with a cult-like dimension, thereby deepening emotional and personal identification with the regime. A clear example of educational-ideological mind-engineering, in which even the financial instruments of the postal service served to reinforce Hitler’s cult of personality from an early age.
[4] pp. Good – very good condition.
