As we’ve discussed in the last two posts, it wasn’t all that hard to forge an identity card in France or Belgium. Pastors and university students did it. But it was actually much more complicated than just creating a document that would pass casual inspection.

The biggest problem with forged documents was that the police could and did call up the town hall where a suspect ID was issued to ask if so-and-so born on such-and-such a date was in their register. A clever forger made sure that the false ID was issued in a place where the records had been destroyed by fighting or were in an inaccessible occupation zone. The best IDs were “true-false” IDs, meaning that they were false but they used the name and birthdate of a true person who had died but was still on the population registry. That information was not easy to come by. Clerks at town halls had that information, and the power to neglect to strike individuals from their registries, which is why resistance groups liked to recruit them as forgers.

The other major difficulty was that a simple identity card was not enough for many occupation authorities. They also required individuals to show their ration cards issued from the same town; they certificate explaining why they were not in the army (for men of military age); their marriage certificate etc. Certain locations required special passes just to be there. Travelling certain routes required passes issued by the German occupation authorities, which were a whole lot harder to forge. The occupation authorities changed them frequently and did things like put numbers on them that a civilian would not know about.

One of Dutch-Paris’s couriers was arrested in Brussels in June 1944 because the false ID he was carrying had one number off. His ID had been made in Switzerland by intelligence operatives, so you could say they were professionals.

Then there’s another little wrinkle that the German police were also forging French and German ID cards. All I can give you is one example that I know about from Dutch-Paris. A Dutchman introduced a young Dutch woman to a man he said was a resister who had connections to London. This self-proclaimed resister was actually an officer in the German Abwehr (military counter-espionage). The young woman, who joined Dutch-Paris not long after this, was fooled by the German officer. When he offered to get her really good false papers and exchange money for her, she accepted. But the “false ID” he gave her had a certain series of numbers on it that allowed the Abwehr to track her at border crossings. The end results were extremely unfortunate for her.

Let’s get back to the original question of how many forgers there were in occupied Europe. The answer is impossible to come by, but it was a lot. There were regular resisters like the student and the pastor in Dutch-Paris. There were resisters with professional ties to document making such as the printer and the town hall clerk in Dutch-Paris. There were resistance groups who specialized in making false documents, such as the ones that the Comite purchased some from in Brussels. And there were undoubtedly outright criminals who were forging documents for profit. Plus all the professionals in the secret services, both Allied and German. As for how many good forgers there were, that’s a question we’ll never be able to answer. The good ones didn’t get caught, and neither did their clients.