ANSWERS: 2
  • Papers = Identification Their motivation was a will to identify everyone. Think of the National ID cards that some nations are trying to make compulsory for all it's citizens to carry.
  • Everybody was required to carry an ID card. Furthermore, if you wanted to travel away from your home area, you had to get a permit to do so, which said where you were allowed to go, when, and something about show you would travel. Basically, anybody not within a few miles of home was assumed to be up to no good unless they had papers showing what good they were up to. So you had always to prove either that you lived here, or that you had a legitimate reason to travel. The reason they are famous is because you usually see films about escapers or spies, who are usually travelling. They were exactly the sort of person the railway police, frontier police, Gestapo, SS etc were trying to catch, so they always had to hide or to have good forged papers. Long distance trains, for example, would be checked every few hundred miles. Checks at all borders, entering and leaving major cities, near military targets, and basically whenever they felt like it.

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