The Last Nazi Germany Passport, 1945 | Passport-Collector
The Last Passport of the Third Reich: Dora Wolzak’s Wartime Story in Her Own Words
Alien Passport No. 35/45. Issued in Berlin on 5 April 1945, barely a month before the Third Reich’s collapse, to a young Dutch bride named Dora Wolzak. When a reader from Canada sent me the images with a simple question, “Is this the last Nazi Germany passport?”, I knew I was looking at something worth digging into.
What Makes This Passport So Rare
The chances are genuinely high that this document is one of the very last passports issued anywhere in the Third Reich. By early April 1945, Berlin was weeks from Soviet encirclement, the German bureaucracy was disintegrating district by district, and the war in Europe would be over by 8 May. A Foreigner’s Passport dated 5 April, complete with a working registration number (35/45), tells us that at least one small corner of the Reich’s civil administration was still functioning almost to the very end. I can’t prove it’s the single last one ever issued, and I won’t claim that with certainty, but it sits about as close to that line as any surviving document I’ve come across.
What makes it more than a curiosity is the story attached to it. The reader who sent it, Wal, also passed along a memoir written by Dora herself in 1989 for her children. It turns what could have been a dry administrative artifact into a full, first-person account of a life lived through two world wars, a contested border region, a convent, and a wartime marriage in a city under siege.
Meet Dora Wolzak: A Life Written for Her Children
Dora Wolzak’s own words, set down on 28 April 1989, are the real archive here, and I’ve kept them largely intact because paraphrasing would strip out exactly the texture that makes a memoir like this worth reading.
Born Between Two Wars: Halle, 1919
Dora was born Dorothea Anna Kutz on 6 February 1919 in Halle an der Saale, Germany, the daughter of Valentin Kutz, a locomotive engineer for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, and Louisa Schnelle.
“It was a wintry day when I was born into this beautiful but miserable world… I still have many memories. A woman came to the house, a friend, the clanging of medical instruments, followed by the cry of a little child. That was my sister Klara.”
She had five siblings: Helmut, Kurt, Klara, Maria, and Barbara, though one brother, also named Kurt, died in infancy of diphtheria. After the First World War, Germany’s postwar contraction cost her father his railway job, and the family relocated in 1924 to Gürkau in Upper Silesia, to land held by her father’s family, where Dora would grow up straddling two identities at once.
Growing Up German in Polish Upper Silesia
Upper Silesia in the 1920s and 30s was contested territory, split by plebiscite between Germany and the newly reconstituted Poland, and Dora’s family lived that division daily. At home the Kutz family spoke German; at school, Polish. Her father’s brother had championed the Polish side of the 1921 plebiscite, and the family’s mail was censored for it. Dora describes Gestapo-adjacent house searches by the Schupo, a German Verband hall in her village burned by Polish patriots (an event she says her own uncle took part in), and a period, by her account, when ethnic Germans in the area went hungry and were refused food by Polish farmers. These are her recollections as written down sixty years later, and I’d treat the more dramatic episodes, like her account of her father visiting local farmers in an SS uniform, as personal testimony rather than independently verified fact; I have no external documentation to confirm or dispute it.
Convent Life at Gaczałkowice
At eighteen, Dora joined the Salvatorian order at the Gaczałkowice cloister, pursuing what she describes as a childhood ambition to become a missionary nun in Africa. Convent life, by her account, was strict and often unkind to a novice who arrived with fewer possessions than the other girls. It was here, in 1937 and 1938, that she watched the political temperature around her rise, culminating in the German-Polish tensions over the Danzig Corridor and Upper Silesia that would end in Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.
War Reaches the Convent
The Wehrmacht’s advance through southern Poland in the autumn of 1939 ran directly through the area of Dora’s convent, and her Mother Superior ordered the novitiates to disperse. Dora fled to Berlin, where she found work as a housekeeper and secretary in the household of Dr. Friedrich Falkenberg, at Zeltingerstrasse 76 in Berlin-Frohnau. It’s a small, human detail worth keeping: she remembered his office desk as having a semicircle cut out of it so he could sit close enough to reach his papers.
Berlin, the Falkenberg Household, and a Post Office Savings Book
On 27 July 1940, Dora opened a Post Office Savings account in Berlin-Frohnau with an initial deposit of 32 Reichsmarks, at 2.25% interest. She was a consistent, modest saver for the next four years, making her final deposit on 16 November 1944 with a balance of 1,705 Reichsmarks. Deposits above 140 Reichsmarks from late 1944 onward likely reflect her fiancé Johan’s military pay being routed to her account, a small but telling window into how a wartime household actually managed money.
Johan Wolzak and the Freiwilligen-Legion Nederland
Dora’s future husband, Johan (Jan) Wolzak, and his countryman Albert Vierstraten were Dutch nationals working at a nursery near Oranienburg, north of Berlin. In August 1941, both men attended an NSB meeting in Berlin and signed an anti-communist petition. That single act had consequences: by late September 1941, the Gestapo pressured them into military service. As Dutch nationals they were ineligible for the regular Wehrmacht, so they were instead channeled into the Freiwilligen-Legion Nederland, a Waffen-SS volunteer formation for Dutch recruits, training first at ‘s-Hertogenbosch and later, for Johan, at Arys in East Prussia. This kind of coerced or pressured enlistment of foreign nationals into SS-affiliated units is a well-documented pattern of the period, though I’d still point readers wanting the fuller institutional history toward primary archival sources rather than a memoir alone.
A Wedding in the Ruins: February 1945
Johan and Dora married on 14 February 1945 at St. Hildegard’s Kirche on Sinsheimer Strasse in Frohnau, Berlin, officiated by Fr. Felix Krajewski. Berlin in February 1945 was already under sustained Allied bombing and facing the approach of the Red Army from the east. Marrying under those conditions tells you something about the couple’s priorities, and it also set the stage for the passport that started this whole inquiry.
The Alien Passport No. 35/45
Seven weeks after her wedding, on 5 April 1945, Dora was issued a Alien Passport (Fremdenpass) in Berlin, registration number 35/45, close to what appears to be the last issued by the Third Reich to a foreign national under its jurisdiction. Marriage to a Dutchman had shifted her legal nationality in German eyes from German to Dutch, and the passport records her occupation as domestic help. It was valid for two years and permitted residence anywhere within the Reich except designated border zones, almost certainly a bureaucratic euphemism for the collapsing front lines. It’s a striking parallel to other late-war and occupation-era German documents I’ve written about, like the 1938 German passport issued at the consulate in Ljubljana, where the issuing authority’s paperwork kept moving even as the political ground under it was shifting fast. For readers interested in how deeply the Reich’s civil administration extended into individual lives during this period, the passport of Governor General Dr. Hans Frank is worth a look for contrast, a document belonging to one of the regime’s most senior officials rather than an ordinary foreign national.
From Berlin to Nijmegen: The Passport’s Postwar Life
The passport’s final pages trace Dora’s actual postwar journey, not just her legal status. On 17 April 1947, Dutch authorities stamped the document to register her in the Municipality of Nijmegen, with further validation on 21 June 1947. Somewhere in this period, the printed nationality field, originally marked “Nederland,” was crossed out and annotated, seemingly to reflect statelessness, a detail I’d want a Dutch-language document specialist to confirm before treating it as settled fact. A stamp dated 18 May 1947 records rationing entitlements, one and a half kilos of bread on the 18th, roughly 500 grams of what was probably eggs the following day, the kind of granular, unglamorous detail that primary documents preserve far better than any secondary account ever could. By November 1947, Dora was writing to the Dutch Red Cross to try to locate her sister Klara Steckel-Kutz, still separated from her outside the Netherlands.
Was This Really One of the Last Passports of the Third Reich?
I can’t give you absolute certainty on that question, and I don’t think anyone honestly can. What I can say is that a Fremdenpass dated 5 April 1945, issued in a Berlin that was days from encirclement, with a working sequential registration number, is about as strong a candidate as this field is likely to produce. Documents like this survive because families keep them, and stories like Dora’s survive because someone, eventually, writes them down. My thanks go to Wal for sharing both.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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