German Passport History and Borders (3/4)
New Travel Freedom? German Passports Global Travel
It was now particularly important to them to control the borders. Political troublemakers were not to be allowed in or out. In order to maintain an overview, passports were standardized.
These documents were large-format papers, which typically included a description of the person and an itinerary. In the 19th century, you couldn’t just travel around at will; the country and destination of the journey were specified. And on the route itself, a visa was also issued in the respective jurisdictions, i.e. a stamp was affixed to the documents so that you could prove that you had actually followed the route and had not traveled across Europe.
The Visa German Passports Global Travel
The visa became established alongside the passport. While the passport document from the home country gave permission to leave the country, the visa stood for permission to enter. The authorities usually stamped the document to indicate that they had seen it.
The passport was validated and entry was permitted. However, the large number of states in the German Confederation made traveling complicated. Each of the 39 kingdoms, grand duchies and principalities had its own passport laws, registers and travel regulations.
Travel Routes
Anyone traveling from Speyer, which at the time belonged to the Kingdom of Bavaria, to the state capital of Munich had to travel through Baden or Hesse and thus through foreign countries. It was actually the case that the original documents of travelers from abroad were collected when they crossed the border.
A new document was then issued, and the documents were then transported to the destination by courier, usually by collective transport, where you then had to prove your identity to get your original documents back. This procedure became really time-consuming if the travel route changed. The ideal was to check travelers as closely as possible. However, until the late 19th century, countries were far from achieving this.
Instead of guarding the border, there were patrols running through the country. Initially, seaports and border stations were systematically controlled. Compulsory registration in inns was another instrument used to record the largest possible flow of mobile people.
The Inns played a crucial role in monitoring traveler movements
The inns in the towns were, of course, easy to monitor. In the 18th and, of course, especially in the 19th century, registration was compulsory. You had to register with the town within a certain period of time, but mostly through the innkeepers.
The inn thus became the extended arm of the state control authorities. How well this system worked depended above all on the cooperation of the innkeepers. However, all the checkpoints were of little help if the travelers used forged documents.
Forged Documents
In some cases, the documents were simply inked and stamped and legitimized by the signatures. As you can imagine, such documents were much easier to forge. The ink was then scratched off, especially where the signaling was concerned. Then its color was entered.
Forging Specialists
However, the authorities already had methods at hand to detect forgeries over 100 years ago. Even in the 19th century, there were specialists who could use chemicals to determine whether a document had been tampered with, whether the ink matched or whether the document had been scratched because the thickness of the paper was no longer correct.
It was therefore possible to determine this using certain 19th century methods. However, the hurdles for forging passports were not particularly high. On the ground, however, police officers had a hard time recognizing forgeries.
Many of them could barely read and write. In addition, the passports were only issued in the respective national language. Police reports from Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg indicate how helpless some police officers were during the checks.
A person who is apprehended with several passports in different names should be considered suspicious, according to one of the reports.
Tom Topol | Passport History Expert & Author.
Featured in media incl. CNN, BBC, Newsweek. Awarded by the U.S. Department of State.
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