Let’s continue with questions from the comments on the side of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV on youtube.

Someone asked, very sensibly, how many good forgers were available to make false documents for the resistance and other fugitives. That’s a question no one will ever be able to answer with any certainty because forgers were criminals. They didn’t belong to a guild or union. They didn’t pay taxes or identify themselves as such on census forms.

It might be possible to count up the number of convictions in trials for forgery, but even that has problems. It would only count the individuals who were arrested and tried for forgery, not the total number of people engaged in forgery. And given the way the occupation authorities rolled, there is no doubt that some people arrested for forgery never had a trial although they may well have endured punishment.

The real question to ask is: who forged the false papers for the resistance and other fugitives? I can tell you a little about the people who I know forged papers for Dutch-Paris.

A man who worked at a big print shop in Toulouse.
A pastor and his wife who lived in Lyon.
A clerk at the town hall of Drancy.
A university student who had good handwriting.

You could say that half our sample – the clerk and the printer – had some professional experience in creating documents. The other half – the pastor and the student – had none. None of them were “forgers” per se. They engaged in forgery because of the unusual circumstances they were thrown into by the war.

I can tell you that the university student was forging the documents for all the fugitives, including Allied aviators, who came through the Dutch-Paris safe house in Brussels because the Comite’s previous source for false documents started charging more than they were willing to pay. I would guess – and this is only a guess – that the pastor and his wife got into this particular crime because they didn’t know how else to get false documents for the people they were helping. Just helping those people escape the Nazis was such a big crime that adding forgery to the list probably didn’t seem like such a big deal.

So now the question changes a bit to ask not only who forged the documents, but how. More on that in the next blog.