O-kee. First, let me try to explain "hell money." In ethnic Chinese traditions, it is a common practice to make offerings to ancestors: incense, food, alcohol, written prayers of course, and money. These can be left in personal shrines or at cemetery markers. Paper objects are often burned with the incense.
Then Christian missionaries showed up to confuse everything. Their explanations of the torments of hell lost something in translation and the Chinese converts focused on the bright and warm aspects of the place. That sounded like their concept of heaven, and the offerings became items to make ancestors comfortable in hell.
Long story short, the early 20th century provided lots of devalued banknotes for ancestors. These were plastered on grave markers or burned at shrines. Then play money for kids in the western markets became an industry in Hong Kong, and viola, let's make our own hell money. Or something like that.
There are collectors that specialize in hell money. The piece that Kris found offered on hipstamp may be of value to them. There was a good article on hell money in Wikipedia some years back.
So, now for what brought us to hell in the first place, for those who couldn't find the Easter eggs for stepping on them. The name of this guy's store on hipstamp is "hellbillyrichard." No lie. Just find Stores on the far right of the scroll bar at the top of your hipstamp home page, then search for hell! Fake Sudentenland stuff. More nazi crap to come, I'm certain. I have watched him a couple of years. I'll stop now, thank you all for your attention...
Sorry if I missed this in all the responses, but these bogus Third Reich issues are not necessarily geared towards the philatelic market. There is a large demand for Third Reich material of most any kind from collectors of such things. Of course some bleeds over to the philatelic market for those unsuspecting collectors.
Fake and bogus material from Germany from the inflation era to the end of World War II is about as bad as all the fakes from Iran.
Certainly so, Michael. In fact, as I was doing some research on this I stumbled into a huge selection of Hitler heads with all sorts of fake overprints in the webzine of a death-metal, pagan, Aryan unity, germanophilic, snow-bathing pseudo-viiking. neo-nazi fruit cake. He openly admitted they were all fake, he just wanted things with swastikas.
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Then Christian missionaries showed up to confuse everything. Their explanations of the torments of hell lost something in translation and the Chinese converts focused on the bright and warm aspects of the place. That sounded like their concept of heaven, and the offerings became items to make ancestors comfortable in hell.
Long story short, the early 20th century provided lots of devalued banknotes for ancestors. These were plastered on grave markers or burned at shrines. Then play money for kids in the western markets became an industry in Hong Kong, and viola, let's make our own hell money. Or something like that.
There are collectors that specialize in hell money. The piece that Kris found offered on hipstamp may be of value to them. There was a good article on hell money in Wikipedia some years back.
So, now for what brought us to hell in the first place, for those who couldn't find the Easter eggs for stepping on them. The name of this guy's store on hipstamp is "hellbillyrichard." No lie. Just find Stores on the far right of the scroll bar at the top of your hipstamp home page, then search for hell! Fake Sudentenland stuff. More nazi crap to come, I'm certain. I have watched him a couple of years. I'll stop now, thank you all for your attention...
Fake and bogus material from Germany from the inflation era to the end of World War II is about as bad as all the fakes from Iran.