In our last blog we were talking about who forged the false documents for resisters and other fugitives. From the admittedly small sample of Dutch-Paris, it appears that resisters did it themselves as one of the tasks required to resist. Any of you who are thinking about your own government-issued identity card in 2023 are probably wondering how on earth ordinary people managed to do that. They could only do it because ID’s were very different during the war than they are today.

A good part of the reason that IDs were so different then lays in politics. For example, it was notoriously difficult to forge Dutch ID cards because an overeager Dutch bureaucrat created a state of the art ID card that was very hard to forge. The Dutch government wasn’t terribly interested in the idea, but it didn’t take him any time at all to sell the Nazi occupation authorities on it. So this post is not about the Netherlands.

The Belgian government, on the other hand, very deliberately created identity documents that were easy to forge. They had not forgotten the harsh German occupation of Belgium during WWI and had no reason to think that this second German occupation during the second war would be any better. Also, Belgium was under the control of the German military rather than the Nazi Party so it was a little easier to slip things like this by.

The French government, on the other hand, was eager to collaborate with Hitler but also very prickly about their autonomy (a contradiction that they didn’t win).

The Belgian and French identity cards were similar enough that we can talk about them together. They were made out of forms printed on card stock. A citizen purchased the form from a newsstand or similar shop and got his or her own passport photos taken at, say, a photo booth in a train station or department store. In France, at least, the citizen also had to purchase a special tax stamp to pay for the card. The citizen then took all these pieces to his or her town hall and had it filled out by hand by the clerk and stamped. Voila, a government ID.

All you really needed to forge an ID was your own ID to copy the handwriting of the clerk, the form that anyone could buy, the photo that anyone could get taken and the tax stamp that, again, anyone could buy. Anyone with an eye for detail and a minimum of artistic talent could copy the town hall stamp (or steal it) and the clerk’s handwriting. It’s safe to assume that the Belgian government was even hoping that its citizens would do this. It certainly made it easier for resisters in Belgium than in the Netherlands although it was not exactly a safe pursuit in either place.