The illustrated István Horthy memorial stamp (Scott #600) is a minor variety: the upper right corner stamp is position #10 from a post office sheet of 50 stamps and is noteworthy because there are nine stars in the sky around the depiction of the legendary Hun warriors of the Milky Way in the upper part of the design.

István Horthy, the elder son of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy, was elected Vice-Regent by the Hungarian Parliament on 19 February 1942 in order to provide a line of succession in case something happened to the Regent. (The creation of the post of Vice-Regent was unprecedented in Hungarian history. Ironically, the elder Horthy, deposed two and half years later in the Arrow Cross putsch, lived to be 89 years old in exile in Portugal, where he died in March 1957.) Given the Hungary’s awkward political situation at the time, the younger Horthy was an ideal choice for the legal succession because of his known Anglo-American sympathies and because he publicly expressed doubts about Hitler’s Germany winning the war. (István’s election was vehemently opposed by the right wing [i.e., Arrow Cross] members of parliament on the pretext that the Horthy family was attempting to ‘found’ a dynasty and would eventually try to have a family member (István’s son, István Jr., elected king.)

During the summer of 1942, the Vice-Regent was dispatched to the Russian front as a pilot of the Hungarian Air Force. While he received accolades for bravado in this capacity, the Regency realized the dangers of this assignment and ordered him to return home as of 21 August 1942. Unfortunately, events circumvented this benevolent order. August 20th is St. Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s national holiday. It is also the name-day of everyone who is christened István. Hence, the Vice-Regent wanted to celebrate his name-day with a training flight before returning home. The flight ended in tragedy: the Italian-made Carponi aircraft with the István Horthy on board crashed headlong into the ground killing the pilot instantly. He returned home in a casket. For a while, his death was rumored to have been caused by German sabotage, but history has turned up nothing more than a suspected mechanical failure of the aircraft.

The pictured memorial stamp was issued in his honor on 15 October 1942 in an edition of 15.69 million copies. It was printed in press sheets of 150 stamps, which were cut into post office sheets of 100 and 50 stamps. The 50-stamp sheets contained two constant plate varieties: the stamp in position 1 showed seven stars in the sky, the stamp in position 10 showed nine stars. All of the other stamps had eight stars. (There is a nebulous note in the Magyar bélyegek kézikönyve about some stamps in sheets of 100 having a different number of stars, but no specific number of stars or position is identified.)

In this era, a few hundred copies of each stamp were retained in imperforate condition. These were destined for the Post Office’s archives and the Stamp Museum, but during the turmoil of World War II entered the philatelic market. None of the standard references (A magyar bélyegek monográfiája, A magyar posta- és illetékbélyegek katalógusa, etc.) provide a number for the imperforates stamps. My guess is that about 400-600 copies of each of these issues exist. If that is the case, then this minor variety (along with the seven-star variety) is the scarcest Hungarian imperforate stamp. Given that the presses printed ‘large’ sheets of 150 stamps, and if 600 were retained in imperforate condition, then only 4 copies of each variety exist. This fact makes the stamp MUCH scarcer than the sought-after Nagymánya, the inverted Madonna, the 600/800 korona Harvester or the 35f/50f Turul, the ‘crown jewel’ errors of Hungarian philately. The scarcity factor also puts these stamps into the same category as the 3kr red error of 1867! I could be wrong, but even if I’m off by a factor of two that would mean the existence of eight copies, maximum.

Interestingly enough, two copies of this stamp were auctioned off on the internet’s e-Bay last year. One was a single marginal copy (which provided the identification for the position even if the stars were not quite visible in accompanying image); the other was a corner block of four. Both copies were purchased by SHP members. There was no competition for the single copy while the bidding for the block of 4 was a bit more spirited.