Operation corn flakes

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Loading of a "bomb" with counterfeit mailbags as part of Operation "Cornflakes". As a rule, however, the mailbags were dropped on the trains without "bomb packaging".
Mail bags forged by the OSS that were dropped on the mail trains.
Three stamps forged by the OSS for "Operation Cornflakes". The two top two were franked, the lower one was enclosed with the letters.
Edition of the propaganda magazine "Das Neue Deutschland", which was often to be found in forged OSS letters.
Forged OSS letter with content

The Operation Cornflakes was a measure of operational information that during the Second World War from 1944 to 1945 by the American Office of Strategic Services was planned (OSS) and carried out. The aim was to trick the Reichspost in National Socialist Germany into unwittingly delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens .

For this purpose, special aircraft were instructed to drop sacks of forged but correctly addressed letters (with addresses from telephone books) in the vicinity of bombed mail trains. It was hoped that the Reichspost would erroneously collect the wrong items during the clean-up work in the vicinity of the impact point and deliver them to the addressees. The items prepared in this way had been franked with forged 6 or 12 pfennig Hitler stamps by the OSS and incorrectly stamped, so that on superficial inspection they should be regarded as ordinary mail. All postage stamps as well as the counterfeit mailbags were produced on an OSS site in Rome .

The corresponding letters often contained issues of the propaganda magazine Das Neue Deutschland , which was published by the Allies in German. In addition, the letters contained forged stamps, which were based on the standard stamp series Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler with the likeness of the " Führer ", but on closer inspection showed distortions, such as Hitler's face as a skull. The template for the stamp was evidently Erwin Blumenfeld's photo collage Hitlerfresse from 1933. In addition, the word 'Deutsches Reich' was replaced by 'Futsches Reich' on the stamps. Franking the actual letters with these stamps would very likely have led to the discovery of the action.

The first mission of "Operation Cornflakes" took place on February 5, 1945, when a small train on the way to Linz was bombed. Sacks with a total of 3800 propaganda letters were dropped on the wrecked train. These were collected as intended and sent to the citizens by the Reichspost. Overall, however, it is assumed that only 3% of all letters forged by the OSS were not discovered and destroyed by controls by the German authorities.

The overall effect of the Cornflakes operation is considered to be minor. Apart from certain delays in the delivery of the mail, which were caused by the additional censorship measures, hardly any “psychological damage” was discernible. After the end of the operation, they tried to find out by questioning prisoners of war to what extent the psychological measures had an effect on the behavior of the soldiers through the forged letters. An estimated number of around 10,000 soldiers was reached who were more or less influenced by the subversive measures. With a production of around 30,000,000 forged letters, postage stamps, magazines, etc., the overall effect can therefore be regarded as quite insignificant. The effects of the so-called Operation Pig Iron , in which only the propaganda magazine Das Neue Deutschland was distributed, are estimated to be much higher. This was done by aircraft dropping miniature editions of the magazine.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Poison Cornflakes for Breakfast (Operation Cornflakes) , modified version of the article in "Society of Philatelic Americans Journal, Vol. 34, No. 6, February 1972" (English), accessed June 21, 2015
  2. ↑ Martin Manning, Herbert Romerstein: Historical dictionary of American propaganda . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 0313296057 .

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