Aletta Jacobs ‘passport’
During WWI, Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929) started her own peace tour through Germany, Belgium, Austria, France, Italy, England, Switzerland and the United States.
On May 6th 1915, she received a visa enabling her to travel through Germany and what then was called Austria-Hungary.
In May of 2003 this document was among the thousands of the supposedly lost documents that were returned to the IAV from Moscow, where it had been since 1945.
Aletta Jacobs wrote the following in her travel journal:
‘On Wednesday, May 19th, Miss Jane Addams and Dr. Alice Hamilton from Chicago, Mrs Van Sulfften Palthe from The Hague and me, left for Berlin. (…). The German women we met were very unpleasant because of the way they expressed their feelings of national pride, their complete lack of sympathy with the nations involved in the war and their strong desire to continue the war until German gained victory.’
