The OSS bombed German mail trains, then dropped forged Nazi letters — including stamps showing Hitler's face replaced with a skull — near the wreckage so postal workers would deliver them as real mail.
In the final year of World War II, the OSS launched a covert psychological warfare campaign with an elegant premise: instead of dropping propaganda leaflets from planes — which everyone knew to ignore — they would trick the German postal service itself into delivering anti-Nazi materials directly to citizens' homes.
The operation worked by bombing German mail trains, then dropping counterfeit mailbags near the wreckage. When postal workers arrived to salvage the mail, they found forged sacks mixed in with the real ones — containing fake letters written to sound like ordinary domestic correspondence, designed to demoralize rather than propagandize.
The forgeries were detailed. OSS operators recruited German prisoners of war with postal experience to advise on every detail of mail collection, cancellation, and delivery procedures. Over two million names were compiled from Reich telephone directories as cover addresses.
The centerpiece was a forged postage stamp. The standard German stamp bore Hitler's profile with 'Deutsches Reich.' The OSS produced a version where Hitler's face was replaced by a skull, and 'Deutsches Reich' was altered to 'Futsches Reich' — meaning 'ruined empire' or 'lost empire' in German slang.
Between January and May 1945, the operation ran twenty missions and claimed a 50% success rate — meaning roughly half the fake mailbags were actually processed and delivered by the Reichspost. Over 320 forged mailbags and 96,000 stamps were produced. The actual number of letters that reached homes is unknown.
The operation faced significant practical obstacles: Allied bombing had destroyed so many addresses that letters had nowhere to be delivered, and recipients who received unsolicited mail from unknown senders often destroyed it out of loyalty or fear. Whether it measurably damaged German morale is a question historians still debate.