An interesting facet of philately is that it often involves mystery and detective work. Some years ago, I acquire the following item which has a foreign postmark on a genuine 1889 1/2 postage & revenue stamp. As we should know, there are at least 4 types of forgeries of this stamp by Fournier, Carame etc
It took me quite some time to work out this cancel. It is not straight forward as the postmark had been applied twice with the second one rotated clockwise about 30 degrees. Logically, I thought the cancel was from neighbouring Dutch East Indies/Indonesia. But I was unable to identify it from the list that I have. Recently, I decided to reconstruct the postmark. And then I realised that the postmark is similar to that on some of my late 18th and early 19th century German stamps.
The Germany & Colonies Philatelic Society has been very helpful in confirming that the village of Brotzen was part of Prussia and there was a small postal agency but no information on any postmarks. What are the caveats here? Firstly, the date of 4 7 1911 is quite late for this stamp but from the information that I have, this issue of stamps were valid till 1935. Secondly, how did this stamp end up so far from its place of origin? However, there were thousands of such stamps available in Britain just across the English Channel. And Paris, Brussels, Berlin etc would have this for sale in their stamp shops as well. And also prior to WWW1, there were quite a few Germans working in North Borneo on plantations, ships and so on.
Brotzen in Prussia is now Broczyno in north western Poland and was part of Prussia prior to 1945 (wikipedia). I found a Brotzen registration label on Ebay and this would be some evidence that this office did exist. This is possibly one of the most uncommon postmarks from prewar Germany.
It has been suggested that this stamp was possibly used to uprate a returning reply postal stationary card from North Borneo. As mentioned above, there were Germans working in North Borneo and one of them might have corresponded with friends or relatives at Brotzen.
