Canada allows omitting place of birth listing on the passports:
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration...ace-birth.html
Austria did too, but I’m not sure if it still does. Austria still allows for passport applicants’ academics degrees (from EU/Schengen educational institutions) to be noted in Austrian passports if the applicant wants it.
Australia may have some place of birth omission history too, but I don’t know about that and I have never seen that. I don’t see as many Australian passports.
Originally Posted by
marlborobell
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.)
The pronunciation changes in the US took place in an era where there were a couple of US internment camps for German-Americans and people who grew up knowing German became afraid of speaking German publicly. By the Second World War, the German-American population was so large that most German-Americans weren’t concerned that they or someone they knew would end up treated by the USG the same way as Japanese-Americans were during WW2.
Some countries list a misleading place of birth, as the place of birth field is used to list the city where the child was first considered to be domiciled/reside with the location of the birth hospital/delivery being ignored by the national authorities when it comes to what shows up in the passport.
Older US passports listed US city of birth too. But then it mainly became US state of birth and country in that field for people born in the US. For people born outside of the US, it’s a bit different history in the US passports.
Omitting it from US passports had been looked at previously in the Reagan-Bush years:
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=307