Truly something special Burma Congo East German

You know that little thrill when you stumble across something truly special? That’s how this early East German passport feels. It was issued in Berlin back in 1956, packed with fascinating visas… including a couple that are really out of the ordinary.

Passports like this only existed in the first years of the GDR, maybe up to 1960, before the Berlin Wall came up in August ’61. After that, traveling to Western countries became almost a fantasy. Only certain trusted people got “service visas,” which makes you think this guy wasn’t just any ordinary citizen… probably an official, maybe even tied to the SED party. Burma Congo East German

What’s wild is that the passport originally expired in 1958 and was only valid for Italy and transit routes. But then it got extended all the way to 1968 — and suddenly valid for every country. Twelve years of validity back then? Pretty unheard of.

• Sweden 1958
• GDR exit visa 1964 for the “Far East/South East Asia”
• BURMA 1964 issued in TOKYO (but no JAPAN visa!?)
• CONGO 1965
• Yugoslavia, CSSR and Austria – all from 1965
• SWITZERLAND multiple transit visa 1968, most likely for the Olympic Winter Games in Grenoble, France

I couldn’t dig up much on the name Wolfgang Noack… but what did turn up was pretty wild. There’s a 2013 newspaper article saying he worked for the STASI under the code name “Schwarzdorn,” keeping tabs on NATO deserters. Kinda gives you a whole new lens to look at this passport through, right? Burma Congo East German

And honestly, this piece is one of the stars of my GDR collection. Early East German travel documents like this are rare enough, but now I’ve somehow ended up with both the earliest and the very last GDR passport, plus a handful of others that each tell their own strange story from a country that only existed for 40 years. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

http://www.zeit.de/2013/10/Nato-Deserteure-DDR-Bautzen/komplettansicht

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