German Briefzentrums

As a collector of postmarks, it has been sad seeing them get consolidated and trivialized in the modern era.  It used to be, every office had its own postmark and we could recognize exactly where the mail came from.  Sure, some of the early postmarks were just numbers, but for over a century there were clear town/date cancels with enough variety of design to make them collectible on their own.

With computers came inkjet cancels, metered mail, vended postage labels and more.  And the postal services of many countries setup efficient networks of processing centers.  In Germany, they set up 99 of these "briefzentrums" (literally "brief" is mail and "zentrum" is center), and the postmarks went from thousands of towns and cities to just Briefzentrum 01 to Briefzentrum 99.

I figured I would have to go to the Deutsche Post website to find some official document about exactly where the centers are, but this Wikipedia article beat me to it.  Not only does it have a fine map, but it ranks the centers by volume of mail handled and even has the dates of when most of them began operating.  

Last week I got a 5 pound on-paper mix of just commemoratives from Germany, and at first I just ignored all those generic postmarks.  Then I started wondering if I could get them all, 1 through 99.  It's not like they're hard to find...


I find that sorting stamps is very relaxing.  It lets my mind wander.  I started working on some numbers in my head ...

Even the medium-sized centers are expected to average about a half million items per day.  Times 99 centers (let's call it 100) is 50 million pieces of mail per day.  Times 365 is 18 billion per year.  I wonder what tiny percent of those even had stamps on them, and what tiny percent of those stamps ever get saved and make their way into mixtures and collections.

It turns out that after 5 pounds of modern Germany mixtures, I found all but 11 of those numbers.  I have a little sheet of yellow paper listing the ones I still need, and I will post an update if I ever complete the set.

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