Photo Gallery Saving Lives with False Papers
Adolfo Kaminsky was saved from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp by false documents provided by a French resistance group. He went on to join the group and become a master at producing forgeries. This photo shows Kaminsky in his photography studio in 1947.
During World War II, Kaminsky's studio in Paris would become the biggest supplier of forged documents for northern France and Belgium, churning out 30 to 50 of them a day and occasionally as many as 500 a week. Many of the documents were used to save Jews from suffering the fate that Kaminsky had so narrowly avoided himself. After the war, he worked as a photographer by day and a forger by night. This photo shows two fake Belgium ID cards that Kaminsky made in the 1960s for French intellectual Francis Jeanson, a prominent supporter of Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle to liberate Algeria from France.
This photo shows a fake Moroccan passport Kaminsky made for Jeanson. Kaminsky claims to have had too many aliases to remember. In fact, there were times when he'd change his name and address every three months. Though police around the world wanted to arrest him, they never tracked him down. Before retiring from forgery in 1971, Kaminsky helped provide fake documents to members of independence movements in South America and Africa.
