The Master Forgers Who Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II

06.12.2023 - 23:13 / atlasobscura.com

A few years ago, at a reception at the Polish embassy in Bern, Switzerland, an elderly Jewish man pulled the ambassador aside and relayed an unbelievable story. They were standing on holy ground, the man said, a place where near-secret acts of heroism played out during World War II. Intrigued, the ambassador, Jakob Kumoch, tasked his staff with looking into the man’s claims. Soon, an incredible history emerged.

Each month, this column will explore the slivers of our society that, over the years, have connived, deceived, and stolen—the psychological twists of heists and cons. This story is full of illegality and duplicity, but it doesn’t otherwise fit the category neatly. In this case, the crime was a moral imperative, and when presented with the opportunity, the government officials involved didn’t hesitate to commit illicit acts.

In October 2023, British historian Roger Moorehouse released The Forgers, which unravels the previously untold story of this daring campaign to rescue European Jews. To pull it off, the Polish government, operating in exile after the German occupation in 1939, forged around 10,000 Latin American passports that helped Jews across the continent escape almost certain death.

They were known as the Ładoś Group, for their leader, the Polish chargé d’affaires to Switzerland, Aleksander Ładoś. The group was made up of four diplomats working out of the Polish embassy in Bern, along with two humanitarian representatives. Three of the six were Jewish.

At the time, Switzerland, an island of democracy amid a rising sea of totalitarianism, was abuzz with spies, diplomats, refugees, and humanitarians. But tensions were high: To maintain their neutrality and autonomy, the Swiss hesitated to blatantly resist Hitler’s Reich.

When Ładoś arrived in Bern in the spring of 1940 as the new Polish envoy, the embassy staff was unimpressed. He was a far cry from Titus Komarnicki, his productive, bustling predecessor. In fact, Ładoś spent most of his days lying on his office couch, in a haze of cigar smoke. But beneath that lazy exterior was a man with a dramatic past: a politician, fighter, and journalist who had been exiled from Poland by Austrian authorities during World War I. To smuggle himself into Switzerland at that time, he’d used a forged passport. Two decades later, Ładoś and the rest of the Polish political class were on the run again. As he escaped the Nazi occupation on a long journey to the Romanian border, one act of kindness stuck with him: the refuge he was given by a Jewish family.

To Poles of that generation, extraordinary circumstances required extraordinary measures, and rule-bending was a necessity of daily life. Since 1795 their land had been ruled by a nearly unbroken chain of