The Master Forgers of World War II

Life-Saving Papers

As Hitler's stormtroopers swept across Europe, possession of the right kind of identity papers became a matter of life and death. For those whose documents amounted to death warrants a brisk trade in forgeries emerged that could save their holders from the gas chambers.

The Ładoś Group

Aleksander Ładoś was the chargé d’affaires in the Polish legation in Switzerland. He took up his post, representing the Polish government in exile, in the spring of 1940. His home country had fallen under the Nazi jackboot and he had escaped by using a fake passport.

Ładoś gathered around him five other men to form a group that worked to save Jewish lives. Aleksander Ładoś, Stefan Ryniewicz, Juliusz Kühl, and, Konstanty Rokicki were all Polish diplomats. Abraham Silberschein was a Pole and Zionist advocate. Chaim Yisroel Eiss was an Israeli merchant living in Switzerland.

Recha Sternbuch, who lived in Montreux, Switzerland, was connected to the Ładoś Group. A Polish Jew, she had smuggled Jewish refugees across the Austrian and German borders with Switzerland.

Switzerland was officially neutral during World War II and did not want to provoke Nazi Germany into attacking it. As a result, the Ładoś Group had to be careful to keep its activities secret.

The Poland/Paraguay Connection

The scheme for saving Jews in peril started with getting them out of the Soviet Union; dictator Joseph Stalin had banned them from emigrating.

Early in 1940, the group found Rudolf Hügli, a Swiss national and lawyer who was acting as the honourary consul for Paraguay. He was interested in making some money on the side and was happy to sell 10,000 blank Paraguayan passports. Money for the passports was raised by the Jewish community in the United States and smuggled to Switzerland through diplomatic pouches.

Ładoś and his partners then started forging the identities of Russian Jews into the documents. Underground Jewish networks then smuggled the passports to their new owners.

With the fake papers, they were able to get out of the Soviet Union and connect up with Polish diplomats in other countries. From there, they were able to get travel documents with which they could make their way to safety in Palestine and other locations.

Others made heroic efforts to help Jews escape a terrible fate.

Escape From the Warsaw Ghetto

Later, the group moved on to rescuing people from the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had bottled up 460,000 Jews in an area of just 1.3 square miles (3.4 km²). They were forced to live in unspeakable conditions with more than nine people squeezed into each available room.

According to the Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, “The scheme really took off in 1942. The list of people qualified for rescue was compiled by the Jewish members of the network. It included rabbis, students, wealthy merchants: people capable of restoring orthodox elites after the war.”

Communication from within the ghetto to the outside world was possible in part by bribing German guards. Photographs went one way and photocopies of duly authenticated Paraguayan passports were sent to the German authorities.

Recommended

Emily Dickinson’s "So has a Daisy vanished"

The get-out-of-the-ghetto-papers enabled a tiny, select few to be removed and placed in internment camps; still no picnic but much better than the ghetto or the extermination factories. Some were lucky enough to be exchanged for German citizens interned in other countries.

The Ładoś Group could not hope to keep pace with the Nazi extermination plan that murdered people on an industrial scale. However, thousands “remained protected by their foreign status, and saw the war’s end by clinging to the fragile papers that had arrived, mysteriously, from Switzerland” (Nina Strochlic, Atlas Obscura).

The Parisian Forger

While the Ładoś Group was saving lives from Switzerland, a young Jewish man with remarkable forgery skills was doing the same in Paris.

When the French government decided to collaborate with Hitler's Nazis rather than fight them, 16-year-old Adolfo Kaminsky joined the resistance.

Tens of thousands of French people (the exact number will never be known) joined; of these between 15 and 20 percent were Jews, although in France they represented only one percent of the population.

They carried out acts of sabotage against German targets and spied on German activities to inform the Allies. The resistance played a vital role in the defeat of the Nazis.

However, being part of the resistance was very dangerous. If captured by the Gestapo or SS, members of the resistance could expect no mercy and received none.

Although still a teenager, Kaminsky had a unique set of skills that enabled him to alter and create fake documents.

He had worked in a factory where he learned which chemicals to use to remove stains and he had picked up knowledge about typesetting while running his school newspaper. Harnessing these abilities he created birth and marriage certificates, ration cards, and identity papers.

He worked day and night and told the newspaper Libération that he had to “Stay awake. As long as possible. Struggle against sleep. The calculation is easy. In one hour, I make 30 false papers. If I sleep one hour, 30 people will die.”

Adolfo Kaminsky's forgeries are reckoned to have saved as many as 14,000 people from the gas chambers.

Bonus Factoids

• Adolf Berger was a Slovakian Jew who was making fake documents so his coreligionists could escape the Nazis. He was captured and sent to Auschwitz but his forgery skills saved his life. He was sent to a camp near Berlin and forced to create counterfeit British currency and documents. The Germans planned to flood Britain with forged money in an effort to destabilize its economy.
• Adolfo Kaminsky continued his creation of false documents after the Second World War. One of his projects was to create forged papers for American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and '70s.
• In March 1944, 76 Allied prisoners of war escaped from the Stalag Luft III camp in what came to be called The Great Escape. Many of the men carried identity papers that had been forged inside the camp.

Sources

• “How a Polish Envoy to Bern Saved Hundreds of Jews.” Zbigniew Parafianowicz and Michal Potocki, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, August 9, 2017.
• “The Master Forgers Who Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II.” Nina Strochlic, Atlas Obscura, December 4, 2023.
• “How a WWII-Era Forger Saved Lives, One Fake Document at a Time.” Anderson Cooper, CBS, 60 Minutes, October 29, 2017.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

© 2024 Rupert Taylor