passport to intrigue

I recently inherited my Grand fathers first passport which he acquired in 1938 at the age of 19. A few things struck me about it.

Firstly: He acquired it before he met my grandmother. This may not seem strange but as I have always thought of the two of them as inseparable I found her omission most odd.

Secondly: The picture of the 19 year old who was looking back at me from within it's pages bared little resemblance to the man I was to come to know many years later.

Thirdly: On one of the visa pages there was a stamp from Nazi Germany.

The third discovery made me draw breath as I have only ever seen swastika's in museums as if they are part of a distant, long forgotten world, totally unconnected to my own. This single stamp gave me a connection, however tenuous to that time and the questions that it raised have been bouncing around inside my head ever since it's discovery. Who was the person who issued the stamp? Where was it issued? And most perplexing of all: What was my grand father doing in Nazi Germany in 1938?

I know that he was in the Civil service (it says so inside the front cover), but this only begs for more questions to be asked. He was there for 6 days and apart from a Swiss visa stamp in 1939, I can see no other foreign travel mentioned within it's well preserved pages. It would appear as if the passport was produced in order to facilitate the trip to the Third Reich, as the issuing date stamp is 10 days earlier than the German visa - but why did he go there????

My wily old grand father remains as alluring in death as he was in life. It is a shame that he passed on before I could ask him about any of this but then he wasn't the sort of man to spend hours relaying stories of the war to a younger generation and perhaps thought that if I really was interested then I would be able to find out by myself.

Behind Closed Doors

I haven't written here for a long time but I now feel compelled to as I have recently finished reading a book called "World War 2 Behind Closed Doors". It was the book of the recent BBC documentary of the same name and was quite an enjoyable and enlightening read as it is the first time I have read something that details the political alliance between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt.
I sometimes get the impression that the second world war, and also with the first, was simply an ideological conflict between forces of good (the allies) and evil (the axis).
As I read further into the book I became aware that thinking of the opposing forces in black and white was far too simplistic. In order to defeat Germany; Britain and America had to align themselves with someone who was at least as evil as Hitler and maybe it was only because he was an even bigger bastard that he won. The constant back tracking and concessions made by Churchill and Roosevelt alluded to the fact that they knew they stood no chance against the Red Army and were simply trying to contain and appease Stalin as best they could. The number and severity of atrocities committed to not only their conquered foes but also their own people were, in my opinion, at least equal to that of the Nazi's.
Realising this has given a bit more of an understanding of my own grandparents reluctance to entertain any notion of victory celebrations. Why celebrate when all you've done is taken on an even greater problem?