During the 1936 Olympics the Haitian and Liechtenstein teams discovered they had the same flag, prompting the latter to change its flag the next year.
Nevertheless, did Haiti and Liechtenstein not exchange ambassadors before then? Did no one ever travel to and from each nation? How was it possible that neither country realized that they had the same flag as each other?
Did any other nation know this, especially those that had foreign relations with both? How come no one ever said anything to either nation and it was only during the Olympics this was discovered?
Thanks for any insight.
Edit: also, before then were there any type of vexillology organizations or international flag databases that may have caught this situation?
There was no internet, wikipedia, or other way to check your facts besides reading a book. Color photography was still way to expensive for most general purposes, so even if someone from one country saw a photograph of a flag, they wouldn't be able to tell it was the exact same flag colorization. Haiti and Liechtenstein are tiny and distant nations without much if any economic/diplomatic contact. Liechtenstein is landlocked so had no direct access to ocean bound international trade, so had even less reason to maintain relations with a tiny island nation.
Further, some weird quirks in the flag laws of the nations frustrated this discovery. While Lichenstien had unofficially been using the red and blue flag since before it was independent of the HRE (one version was used by Prince Joseph Wenzel I in 1764), it only became the official flag of the country in 1921.
Haiti, meanwhile, actually had two different flags. The "civil" flag is just red and blue, but their "national" flag actually has a small coat of arms in the center. If someone had a big book of flags, and the book of flags had Haiti's national flag, they would only find that Haiti and Liechtenstein had similar flags, rather than identical ones.
