Polish service passport from 1949
Passport for occupied Germany.
The item here is one of the rarest, in my opinion, that can be discovered with connection to the allied occupation of Germany.
One of my passions in collecting old passports is to polish passports from the Second Republic and also to WW2 related documents and papers. The sample here combines these two topics and makes it an attractive specimen indeed.
1949 Warsaw issued service passport to an accountant named Zygmunt Pastuszynski, born in 1922 in Lodz (during the war it was called Litzmannstadt and was also the location of one of the largest and long kept Jewish Ghettos – Ghetto Lodz).
The passport was issued on February 1st for the purpose of traveling, officially, to Germany and judging by the extension stamps inside most likely an official accountant working for the foreign ministry who was being sent to the Polish diplomatic missions in the occupied zones: Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Düsseldorf (need to point out that the passport was NOT issued by the Foreign Ministry, which was issuing passports from the second half of 1945 and onwards, but by the Ministry of Public Administration, which was in charge of passport issuing, briefly, during 1949 to around 1950).
The passport has four extensions up to the end of December 1950, and fully used. We can presume that a new one was issued to him in 1951, while still serving abroad. The passport, besides having official allied military government (AMG) visas for departure and the return back to Germany, it also has the exit & return visas from the Soviet authorities to transit through their eastern zone of occupied Germany: this is the first time I have located such a visa inside a passport! Rough translation, sampled visa on page 28, reads:
“Entry & exit visa No. 152283 from July 11th 1949, issued to polish Citizen Pastuszynski Zygmunt to leave the Soviet occupation zone of Germany to Poland and return back by train through Frankfurt, valid from July 12th to July 22nd“
The passport has additional Czech service visas issued from their consulates in Frankfurt and Hamburg.
Though the photo of the passport holder is lacking, it is in complete and well preserved state. The earliest pre-printed service passports issued by post-war Poland that I have seen date from the second half of 1946: a previously issued earlier sample from March that year uses a regular passport that was hand-stamped on the title page “Service Passport“, an indication that during the first half of that year they were still not printed out.
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Thank you for reading “Our Passports”.
