This was an April 1946 issue from a country already under Soviet domination, and soon to have a communist government. It was entirely in their interests to remind people at home that they had been liberated from such evil by the Soviets. Majdanek was a concentration camp not hidden away, like some were, far from a population centre, but actually within the Polish city of Lublin. Even before the war ended the Soviets had begun an investigation into war crimes there, and a museum was swiftly opened. Directing the residual hatreds of a wretched Polish population towards the absent Nazis and away from the present hard-line communists was a clear and necessary policy. The Eastern bloc produced many stamps in the following decades to remind their populations of Nazi crimes - though few, perhaps, with the grim power of this one.

It would have no doubt been wise to be seen to use these stamps in support of the Soviet-Polish drive to expose the evils of Nazism and extol the virtues of the new socialist state. But no, you wouldn't put one on a birthday card to your little niece.

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