German passport paper usage
Post-War use for lottery in 1945.
Here is a fine example of post-war paper shortage usage. After the war there was an acute shortage of paper manufacturing, and we can find this in liberated countries throughout Europe and even as far as in China. Many businesses and newly formed government offices came across shortage of paper when they had to start printing material. We can find various checks, invoices, forms, tickets, ID’s that were issued, after the surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, using war-time paper: either German or Japanese manufactured paper.
I have seen checks issued by newly formed banks in liberated north-eastern China using war-time Japanese produced paper (in what was the puppet state of Manchuria) with their water-mark (this is the way one can identify the paper) and also in Poland, where temporary issued identity documents, or invoices, were printed by using war-time German paper that originally was used for ration-vouchers in the early 1940’s.
The item in this article relates to post-war paper used in liberated Austria, in 1945, were the government issued lottery vouchers, and the paper used was most likely taken from the former Third Reich printing press, the press that manufactured the paper for war-time passports: the identical watermark that appears in Nazi Germany issued passports is identical to the one found in this post-war lottery voucher issued in October of 1945!
I have added here the images for you to make the comparison.
Thank you for reading “Our Passports”.