Gedser Village

The town of Gedser is a small city but a large number of people will actually pass by every year since this is the departure point of the ferry to Germany the ferry goes from Gedser to the German city of Rostock from where you can reach Berlin quickly.

This ferry route used to go the former East Germany since Rostock is located there. So back before 1989 only a few people could gross from the south to Denmark since the communist Germany didn’t allow their citizen to travel to the west.

This all suddenly changed when the Berlin wall came tumbling down in the fall of 1989. Suddenly there was no more iron curtain separating Europe and the people from East Germany could travel to Denmark. Suddenly a huge number of people from Rostock suddenly wanted to go and see what were on the other end of the ferry line they had seen traveling the water just outside their city for years. The people now wanted to go to Denmark.

This posed some concern amongst the Danish border police – what should they do? The standard rule was East Germans were only allowed into Denmark with a valid visa. Obviously the hundreds of people who decided just to travel right then didn’t have any visa – many didn’t even have a valid passport. So what to do – it was decided the people would be allowed to go on land from the ferry and have a look around. Another problem was they only had East German marks which were worthless. To make sure they did have a little cash so they could by a post card or an ice cream it was decided to give every arriving person from East Germany 100 DKK which is about 15€. Not a huge amount of cash but back in 1989 it was enough to buy a few things.

The chaos of 1989 has long gone but the locals have made a small memorial stone to the friendship between countries and cities. Except for this there are limited sights in the city and you can quickly continue your journey to Germany or Gedser Odde if you just want to explore the southernmost point in Denmark.