Danzig Senate Passport 1935 | Passport-Collector
The Passport Number Was 98. That Tells You Everything About How Rare This Document Is.
Ninety-eight. That’s the serial number stamped inside this 1935 Senatspass, the diplomatic passport of the Free City of Danzig, and it’s the kind of detail that stops a serious collector cold. It means only ninety-seven other people in the entire Free City held this exact class of document before this one was issued. How many survived the war, the Soviet advance into East Prussia, and eighty-plus years of attics and estate sales? I’d guess we’re talking about a handful, if that. This is the first Danzig Senate passport of this specific diplomatic type I’ve featured on the site, and it belonged to a man whose career reads like a case study in how ordinary German civil servants navigated (and sometimes enabled) the twentieth century’s worst turns.
Why the Free City of Danzig Needed Its Own Diplomatic Passports
The Free City of Danzig issued Senate passports because it was, legally speaking, its own country, even though almost nobody involved wanted it to stay that way. The Treaty of Versailles carved Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) out of Germany in 1919 and placed it under League of Nations supervision rather than handing it to either Germany or the newly reconstituted Poland. Under Article 105 of that treaty, German nationals who were ordinarily resident there lost their German citizenship and became nationals of the Free City instead, a stateless-in-between status that persisted until the Nazi annexation in September 1939. A Senatspass like this one, marked for diplomatic use, was the highest tier of that identity system, reserved for the small circle of officials who represented Danzig’s Senate abroad. If you want the fuller picture of how that passport system worked, I laid out the three main civilian passport types (plus the rare Alien passport) in my earlier piece on Free City of Danzig passport history.
The Son of a Landowner Who Became a Diplomat
Hans-Richard Hirschfeld was born on October 26, 1900, in Aasbüttel, the son of landowner Feodor Hirschfeld and his wife Emma, née Schwerdtfeger, and his path to holding this passport started nowhere near a foreign ministry. He attended the Realgymnasium in Rendsburg, served in the German military from June to December 1918, and passed his high school exam that September, that overlap alone tells you how compressed the end of the First World War was for young Germans of his generation. He went on to study law and political science at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and the University of Jena, joining the Corps Thuringia Jena as a student in 1920. After his Referendar exam in May 1923, though, his career took an unexpected detour: he worked in ship and cargo control for the Hamburg-America Line, then spent time as a sailor and, until mid-December 1924, as a construction worker in New York. It’s a strange resume for a future ambassador, and exactly the kind of texture that makes a single passport worth this much research.
From Prussian Civil Servant to the Presidential Department of the Danzig Senate
By late 1925, Hirschfeld had traded manual labor for the civil service, and that’s the track that eventually put a diplomatic Senatspass in his hands. He joined the Justice and Administrative Service of the Free State of Prussia on November 14, 1925, then transferred to the Free City of Danzig on December 22, 1925. After passing his assessor’s examination on January 29, 1930, he rotated through Danzig’s Foreign Department and, from June 1931 to July 1932, the Presidential Department of the Senate, before becoming a member of the Government Council on November 1, 1932. When this passport was issued in 1935, he was several years into that Presidential Department posting, exactly the kind of official the Senate needed to move internationally on its business.
The NSDAP Membership and the Wartime Foreign Office Years
On February 27, 1936, Hirschfeld was drafted into the German Foreign Service, and on May 1, 1936, he joined the NSDAP, a detail that sits uncomfortably alongside the rest of his career and one I’m not going to smooth over. He started as an attaché in the Foreign Office’s legal department before being posted to the Consulate General in New York on October 3, 1936. He became vice-consul there in May 1938 and consul in December 1940. When the German consular authorities in the United States were shut down in June 1941, he was reassigned to administrative and propaganda-related tasks inside the Foreign Office itself, before moving to the Legation Council in Bern on September 12, 1941, then to Bern in a Counsellor role from June 1944. From June to November 1945, in the war’s final chaotic months, he worked with the Federal Political Department at the German Representation of Interests in Basel.
Denazification, Reykjavik, and a Quiet Return to Diplomacy
Hirschfeld’s postwar career shows how thoroughly West Germany’s early Foreign Office absorbed officials from the Nazi period once they’d cleared denazification, which he did in November 1947. He spent a few years in ordinary civil administration, running the housing office at the Schenefeld District Office from 1948 to 1950, before being pulled back into diplomatic work on June 14, 1950, initially through the Federal Chancellery, since the Foreign Office itself wasn’t formally re-established until March 1951. From late 1951 he headed the Department of Private International Law and Civil Law, took over the re-established Consulate General in Antwerp in September 1953, and was appointed West German Ambassador to Iceland on November 2, 1956, a post he held until his retirement on May 25, 1964. He died on June 28, 1988, in Remagen-Oberwinter, at 88.
What the Physical Document Shows
Beyond the biography, the passport itself is worth lingering on: the Senate stamps, currency exchange stamps, and a Dutch visa issued in Danzig are all still visible on its pages, along with a wartime telegram informing Hirschfeld that “the Führer” had promoted him to consul second class, timed, almost absurdly, as a Christmas greeting. The accompanying estate material includes his 1939 NSDAP membership book, a 1941 Foreign Office statement, personal photographs, and a large certificate of appointment to Gesandtschaftsrat first class dated June 27, 1944, carrying the original signatures of both Adolf Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. That’s an unusually complete paper trail for a mid-level diplomat, and it’s what makes this estate lot more than just a passport.
Where This Document Came From
This passport surfaced through Helmut Weitze Militaria, the German militaria dealer who sold the document and generously supplied the photographs featured here, and I’m grateful for both. If military collectibles are your thing more broadly, their catalog is worth a browse. My thanks also go to the fellow collector who first flagged this Senatspass for me. It’s exactly the kind of find that reminds me why this niche of collecting rewards patience: you can go years without seeing a diplomatic Senate passport, and then one shows up with an entire career, and a very complicated one, attached to it.
If Danzig documents interest you, two related pieces worth reading next are my writeup on a matched pair of Danzig-Germany passports issued to a married couple in 1938, and my feature on a 1925 Nansen passport issued by the Free City of Danzig to a stateless refugee under League of Nations protections, a striking contrast to the diplomatic privilege on display here.
Further reading: Hans Hirschfeld’s Diplomatic Passports
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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