Originally Posted by
tfar
The city of birth is listed in German passports, too. When it is a German passport and German city, it is assumed that this city is in Germany. So it will only say "Berlin" for example under birthplace. But what they mean is, of course, Berlin, Germany ... not any of the NINE Berlins in the USA.
As a resident of one of those Berlins (probably the smallest) I'm amused. (Fun fact: during World War I, we decided to declare we were different from the enemy capital... by changing the pronunciation of the town's name. It's BER-lin, not Ber-LIN.)
What has always intrigued me (and I'm doing this from memory, so I
could be wrong, but I don't think so) is that my son's US passport lists his place of birth as MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A. and his British passport lists it as FRAMINGHAM. As if any Brit knows where Framingham is.
(Actually,
for a while in 1997, most Brits had heard of Framingham, but that's another story. I remember wondering where it was and looking it up on a map, never thinking that three years later I'd be living in a neighboring town.)