Top 10 Forged Documents That Saved Lives in World War II

In occupied Europe, forged or irregular papers — visas, identity cards, and medical certificates — were sometimes the difference between rescue and internment. This list is a curated set of ten documented cases, not a ranking of courage, and not a complete history of wartime rescue. The tone is factual. The violence of the period is not described in graphic terms ^[1][4][8].

Some of these papers were illegal under the law of the occupier or of a neutral state. Some were real visas issued against orders. A few were medical certificates that misled an occupying authority. What they share is a paper trail that later courts, museums, and Yad Vashem or national archives have been able to check ^[1][2][5].

Key Facts

Numbers of people saved are often estimates. Where a range exists, the entry gives it. Several rescuers were punished in their own countries and recognized only later.

Ten Documented Paper-Rescue Cases at a Glance

1. Adolfo Kaminsky

Adolfo Kaminsky, a young Jewish immigrant in Paris, was recruited into a resistance forgery workshop after his skill at removing ink, learned in a dye shop, became obvious to an underground group ^[1]. Working under a false name, he produced identity papers and related documents for people at risk, including many children. The National WWII Museum, summarizing later historical estimates, reports that researchers have placed the number of people his wartime forgeries helped to protect in the range of about 10,000 to more than 14,000 ^[1]. He asked for no payment.

The work was technical and exhausting: typefaces, stamps, aging of paper, and the knowledge that a weak document could be fatal. Kaminsky later said that a document carried a life, a remark that has been widely quoted and that matches the scale of the workshop's output ^[1]. He lived until 2023. The estimate of lives saved is an estimate, not a precise roll call, but the workshop itself is not in doubt.

2. Jan Zwartendijk and the Curaçao Notations

In July 1940, Jan Zwartendijk, a Philips official acting as Dutch consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, began writing in travel papers that no visa was required for admission to Curaçao and other Dutch Caribbean possessions ^[2]. The formula followed a wording first used by a Dutch diplomat in Riga. In practice, almost none of the holders ever reached Curaçao. The notation was valuable because it gave the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Chiune Sugihara, a basis for issuing transit visas, which in turn helped people obtain Soviet exit papers ^[2].

Yad Vashem records that Zwartendijk issued such notations in a short window, from late July until the Soviets closed the consulate on 3 August 1940, and that the number may have reached about 2,300. Together with Sugihara's transit visas, more than two thousand Jewish refugees reached Japan; some later went on to other countries, and about a thousand were sent to Shanghai, where they survived the war ^[2]. Zwartendijk burned official traces and did not speak of the work for decades. The Dutch government learned of it much later. The "island nobody could reach" was, in this case, not a fiction about geography. It was a legal wording that opened a real route.

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3. The Ładoś Group

In Bern, a group of Polish diplomats around the envoy Aleksander Ładoś, working with Jewish organizations, obtained and issued passports and citizenship papers of Latin American states, including Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, and Peru ^[3]. The papers were not a tourist ticket. In many cases they could change a holder's status in German eyes from a person without protection to a foreign national, which might mean internment and a chance of exchange rather than a worse fate ^[3]. Konstanty Rokicki did much of the direct passport work; Stefan Ryniewicz, Juliusz Kühl, Abraham Silberschein, and Chaim Eiss were among the others later identified by researchers.

A research project associated with the group has identified thousands of named holders; one published tally has identified 3,282 people ^[3]. That is not the same as a count of everyone who survived, and the operation was unusual because the diplomats were producing documents of countries that were not their own ^[3]. The list work continues. The core fact is already solid: a Polish legation in a neutral capital ran a paper-rescue network, and the documents can still be studied.

4. George Mandel-Mantello

George Mandel-Mantello, a Jewish diplomat attached to the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, issued documents that presented holders as Salvadoran citizens ^[4]. He worked with Salvadoran officials, including Colonel José Castellanos Contreras in the wider Salvadoran rescue story, and with a small staff that expanded during the 1944 crisis in Hungary ^[4]. The papers were prepared individually, often typed or handwritten, and were issued without fees.

Mantello also helped to publicize reports of deportations from Hungary, which is a separate, documented part of his wartime work ^[4]. The citizenship papers are the item for this list: a stream of protective documents from a small consular post in Switzerland, later discussed in Holocaust and diplomatic histories, and distinct from the Ładoś passports even when both used Latin American identities.

5. Paul Grüninger

Paul Grüninger, the Swiss border police commander in the St. Gallen region, faced a closed-border policy after the Anschluss. In 1938 and early 1939 he allowed Jewish refugees to enter and then falsified their registration so that papers showed arrival before the date when legal entry had been restricted ^[5]. The backdating let people be treated as legal entrants and moved to a camp at Diepoldsau to await further permits. Yad Vashem and later biographies put the number of people he helped at about 3,600 ^[5].

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Switzerland dismissed him in March 1939, tried him, and convicted him of official misconduct and forgery. He lost his post, his pension, and his public standing, and he died in 1972 in poverty ^[5]. Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1971. A later Swiss rehabilitation came after his death. The case is a clear example of a police official forging dates, not to enrich himself, but to make a refugee's presence lawful on paper.

6. The Assisi Network

After the German occupation of Italy, Giuseppe Placido Nicolini, the bishop of Assisi, set up a committee, based in his residence, to help refugees and, within that work, to hide Jews and supply them with false identity and ration cards ^[6]. Father Aldo Brunacci ran much of the logistics. Father Rufino Niccacci helped to place people in monasteries and convents, including some normally closed to outsiders. Luigi Brizi and his son Trento printed false papers on a small press in a souvenir shop; seals were obtained through a trusted etcher, and documents were carried between workshops by bicycle ^[6].

Yad Vashem has documented the network. The bishop's palace was a headquarters and a hiding place for personal and religious objects, not a industrial "forgery lab" in the cinematic sense ^[6]. The printing was done by lay collaborators. The accurate story is still a document-rescue story: a diocesan committee, a printer, and a set of cards that could let a family live under an assumed name in a town that had become a shelter.

7. The Amsterdam Identity-Card Workshop

The Persoonsbewijzencentrale, started by the sculptor Gerrit van der Veen, was among the largest forgery workshops in occupied Europe ^[7]. From 1942 it produced tens of thousands of forged Dutch identity documents and many other papers. The Silent Heroes Memorial and related research have cited a figure of roughly 65,000 identity documents, plus other forms ^[7]. Many members of the group were themselves Jewish. The workshop also obtained blanks and ration cards by risky means, and after an attack on the Amsterdam registry office, several participants were arrested. A later attempt to free them failed, and van der Veen and others were killed ^[7].

The scale is the point for this list. A single Paris workshop and a single Amsterdam workshop both show that forgery in the occupation was not only a matter of a few passports. It was, in these cases, organized production, with tools, stamps, and a workforce, aimed at keeping people able to walk in the street under a false name.

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8. Doctors Łazowski and Matulewicz

In the Rozwadów area of occupied Poland, Drs. Eugeniusz Łazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz used a medical deception: they injected healthy patients with a preparation that made a standard test for typhus come back positive, without causing the disease ^[8]. German authorities, fearing an outbreak, imposed restrictions that reduced their presence in the area. Memorial and academic accounts describe the ruse as protecting local residents, including people in danger from the occupation, until suspicion rose and Łazowski left ^[8].

This was not an identity-card operation. It was a forged or misleading medical result, which is why it belongs on a list about papers that saved lives. The numbers later attached to the story vary and should be treated with care. The method, the two doctors, the place, and the fact of a quarantine-style response are the documented core.

9. Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer in the underground, arranged to be arrested in a Warsaw round-up in September 1940 under the assumed name Tomasz Serafiński, using forged or adapted papers, so that he could enter the German camp at Auschwitz ^[9]. His purpose, recorded in later official Polish publications, was to organize prisoners, send out information, and look for means of resistance. He escaped in April 1943 and wrote a report, known as Report W, on what he had seen and learned ^[9].

The mission is one of the most closely studied volunteer intelligence operations of the war. This entry stays with the document and the assignment: an assumed identity, a planned entry, a report to the underground, and later publication by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance ^[9]. It does not describe the camp in graphic terms. The papers were the means of entry; the report was the means of telling outsiders what the papers had made it possible to see.

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10. Aristides de Sousa Mendes

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, issued transit visas in June 1940 to refugees fleeing the German advance, including many Jews, after Portugal's government had told diplomats to restrict such visas ^[10]. He worked, in a short and intense period, to stamp passports so that people could enter Portugal and, often, go on elsewhere. Estimates of the number of visas vary, but the event is not in doubt: a consul disobeyed a circular, issued papers on a large scale, and was later recalled and punished by his own government ^[10].

Portugal eventually rehabilitated him, and Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations. Like Zwartendijk and Grüninger, Sousa Mendes used real official stationery in a way his superiors had forbidden. The paper was a visa, not a homemade card, and for thousands of people it was the document that let them leave a collapsing frontier.

Conclusion

The ten cases above are not one method. Kaminsky and the Amsterdam workshop made false cards. Zwartendijk, Sugihara, and Sousa Mendes used official visas against or beyond their instructions. The Ładoś Group and Mantello produced Latin American identities in Switzerland. Grüninger backdated police records. The Assisi network combined a diocesan committee with a printer. Two Polish doctors faked a laboratory result. Pilecki used an assumed name to carry out an intelligence mission.

What the record shows, without embellishment, is that paper was a weapon of rescue as well as of control. The people who made or issued that paper left enough of a trail that their work can be described, counted within limits, and checked against archives rather than against legend.