Top Secret

I was born in the 1950s in a Royal Air Force Hospital in Cold War West Germany. I have two legitimate birth certificates, one from the RAF and one from the British Consulate in Dusseldorf. I was (according to my mother) baptised at St Hubertus, the CoE Chapel on the RAF base at which Dad was serving.

Fifty years later my mother started handing over bundles of documents and in 2006 I started sorting them out and extending the collection. Amongst the papers I eventually sorted was a certificate of baptism for my brother. There was no such certificate for me. However in the “Unser Kind” family photo album there were photos of me in the knitted christening gown my mother had made for my brother’s christening labelled to the effect “Susan February 1955".

Cute Sue, photographed February 1955 by the station photographer (who lived in the flat upstairs). Photograph in the possession of the author.

While researching various other aspects of my family I always kept an eye out for British Forces baptisms, after all the British Forces birth register indexes were publicly available. No luck. So in 2011 I started emailing every possible institution I could find on the web. Eventually the Armed Forces Chaplaincy Centre referred me to a lovely gentleman at “DBS-KI-RecordsReview 5", based at HM Naval Base Portsmouth. This lovely gentleman was assessing classified Cold War military-related documents for de-classification. The religious records for the British Armed Forces in Germany were being de-classified in preparation for handing over to the UK National Archives!
The lovely gentleman found my baptism and posted me a photocopy.¹

Baptism entry for Susan Hilary Commons.¹

As you can see, the entries are all military and contain the rank, unit and base of the father. This sort of information could have been used by a hostile intelligence service to build a fairly complete picture of the British Armed Forces deployment across Germany at that time.

Sources

1. Baptism of Susan Hilary Commons, 13 Feb 1954, Trinity House C of E Leadership Centre, “H.Q., 2.T.A.F. Command Register 1948-”, page 4