Hans Frank’s WWII Passport | Passport-Collector
The Passport of a Nazi War Criminal: Hans Frank’s 1941 Document
This passport was issued to expire on 20 November 1946, a date that Hans Frank never reached as a free man. He was hanged at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, five weeks before his own travel document would have lapsed.
I’m looking at the German Reich passport issued to “Governor General Dr. Hans Frank, Reich Minister” on 21 November 1941 in Kraków, document number 680/41 with perforated numbering 84911M40. The issuing office stamp reads “Office of the Governor General, Department of Internal Administration,” and the location is given as “Kraków Fortress.” The photo page shows Frank in civilian dress, with his handwritten ink signature underneath.
Frank held the title of Governor-General of the “General Government,” the German administrative zone carved out of occupied Polish territory that was not formally annexed into the Reich. It is, without question, one of the more chilling documents I’ve catalogued: a routine bureaucratic object, a Reisepass, belonging to a man who used his legal training and his proximity to Hitler to help administer one of the deadliest periods of the twentieth century.
Where the Governor-General Traveled, 1941 to 1943
The visa pages tell a story of a man moving through Axis and satellite territory rather than fleeing it. Between 1941 and 1943, Frank’s passport accumulated registered visas for Hungary, Slovakia (three separate entries), Italy, and Germany, a mix of one-off and re-entry visas consistent with official Reich business rather than personal travel.
The passport itself shows heavy wear, consistent with several years of active official use across multiple borders.
The Man Behind the Signature
Hans Frank (1900 to 1946) joined the DAP, the precursor to the NSDAP, in 1919, and trained as a lawyer, eventually serving as one of Hitler’s personal attorneys. His rise through the party’s legal apparatus was rapid: in 1933 he became Reich Commissioner for the coordination of the judiciary, later serving as Reich Law Leader and heading the NSDAP’s Legal Office. By 1934 he sat in the government as a Minister without Portfolio.
In 1939, following the invasion of Poland, he was appointed governor-general of the occupied Polish territories left outside direct Reich annexation. It was in this role that he oversaw and was later held responsible for crimes against the civilian population, including the administration tied to the ghettos in Lwów, Warsaw, and Łódź. At the Nuremberg trials, Allied judges found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as one of the major defendants, and he was sentenced to death.
The passport is illustrated and described in John K. Lattimer’s Hitler and the Nazi Leaders: A Unique Insight into Evil, which remains a useful reference point for anyone trying to trace this document’s provenance, though I’d treat it as a secondary source rather than an archival one.
How a New Jersey Urologist Ended Up With a War Criminal’s Passport
Dr. John K. Lattimer was a urological surgeon based in Englewood, New Jersey, and one of the most prolific private collectors of Nazi-era militaria in American history. His thirty-room Englewood home reportedly held an extraordinary range of material spanning medieval armor, Revolutionary and Civil War-era rifles and swords, a stockpile of cannonballs, World War II-era machine guns, German Luger pistols, and drawings attributed to Adolf Hitler.
Lattimer’s access to this material traces back to his service as a U.S. Army medical officer at the close of the war, which put him in direct contact with captured Nazi leadership and the physical objects surrounding the Nuremberg proceedings. That access is what makes his archive, however unsettling, historically significant: it wasn’t assembled after the fact from dealers, it was gathered close to the source.
Beyond the Passport: The Grimmer Corners of the Lattimer Archive
Lattimer’s collection extended well past uniforms and documents into personal effects taken from several Nuremberg defendants, including underwear belonging to Hermann Göring and his Luftwaffe ring. Among the more disturbing items Lattimer held was reportedly one of the two cyanide capsules Göring smuggled into his Nuremberg cell; Göring used the second capsule to take his own life minutes before his scheduled execution.
The archive apparently also included a blood-stained collar said to have been worn by President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on the night of his assassination, and a preserved section of tissue that Lattimer himself claimed had belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. I want to flag that last claim clearly: it rests entirely on Lattimer’s own assertion, and I have no independent verification of it, so I’m presenting it here strictly as an attributed claim rather than an established fact.
This Hans Frank passport was sold at auction for $10,260, sourced directly from the Lattimer collection.
If you’re new to this corner of collecting and wondering how documents like this even surface on the market, my piece on where collectors typically start walks through the basics. And if you want the fuller picture of how I built out this archive over the years, my collection overview is the place to go.
NYT article on Lattimer historic oddities
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