One of the Last Third Reich Passports Ever Found
The Passport That Nearly Outran the War
I may not have the very last German passport of this type still floating around out there. A fellow collector has told me he holds one issued May 4, 1945, just three days before the surrender. But what I’m holding is close enough to give me chills: a Reisepass issued April 13, 1945, in Hamburg, complete with a visa for German-occupied Denmark stamped the same day, April 23, 1945. The last entries in the passport, also from Denmark, are dated April 30, 1945. Two days later, the Battle of Berlin was over. Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7, 1945 (three language versions of that surrender document exist, incidentally, though only the Russian and English texts carry authoritative status).
Think about that timeline for a second. This passport’s holder, a man named Willy Fuhrhorn, was crossing into occupied Denmark less than two weeks before the Third Reich ceased to exist as a functioning state. Why he was making that trip at that exact moment, I honestly don’t know. The document doesn’t say, and I won’t pretend I can fill in a story the paperwork itself doesn’t tell.
Why Denmark, of All Places, in April 1945
Denmark’s occupation began with Operation Weserübung on April 9, 1940, and didn’t end until German forces withdrew following their surrender to the Allies on May 5, 1945, mere days after Fuhrhorn’s passport shows him crossing the border. Unlike most territories under German control, Denmark was allowed a strange kind of normalcy for much of the war. Both the Danish king and government stayed in the country, operating in an uneasy détente between a democratic state and a totalitarian occupier, right up until 1943, when the Danish government resigned rather than accept German demands to institute the death penalty for acts of sabotage.
What the Occupation Actually Cost Denmark
Denmark’s wartime death toll was strikingly low by the standards of occupied Europe, and that fact alone tells you something about how differently this occupation unfolded compared to its neighbors. Just over 3,000 Danes died as a direct result of the occupation. Add to that roughly 4,000 Danish volunteers who died fighting for the German army on the Eastern Front, plus 1,072 merchant sailors lost in Allied service, and you’re still looking at a mortality rate of around 0.08% of the population, remarkably low compared to most other occupied and belligerent nations (see World War II casualties for the broader comparative picture).
The Rescue That Set Denmark Apart
By late in the war, an effective Danish resistance movement had taken shape, and it’s largely responsible for one of the most extraordinary chapters of the entire occupation: when German authorities ordered the internment of Danish Jews in 1943 as part of the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority were rescued through a coordinated effort to smuggle them to safety in neutral Sweden. It stands as one of the few genuinely successful national rescue efforts of the entire war.
A Nation Reckons With Its Own Record
Denmark’s public reckoning with the collaborationist years didn’t come until decades after the war ended. In 2003, marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the 1940 to 1943 collaborationist government, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen described Denmark’s cooperation with the Nazis as “morally unjustifiable.” It was the first time a sitting Danish leader had publicly condemned that era of Danish leadership.
If you’ve come across a Third Reich passport with a later issue date than April 13, 1945, or you happen to know anything about Willy Fuhrhorn and what brought him to Denmark in those final chaotic weeks, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. You can reach me directly, or find more of this kind of research on @passporthistory.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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