The secret history of one of the largest—and least-known—rescue operations of World War II Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable—and until now, completely unknown—humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they masterminded a systematic program of forging passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust. With the international community failing to act, the operation was one of the largest actions to aid Jews of the entire war. The Forgers tells this extraordinary story for the first time. We follow the desperate bids of Jews to obtain these lifesaving documents as the Nazi death machine draws ever closer. And we witness the quiet heroism of a group of ordinary men who decided to do something rather than nothing and saved thousands of lives.
Living the Dream. Historian and author of an international bestseller - "Berlin at War" was #1 in Lithuania :-) - as well as a few other books, such as "Killing Hitler", "The Devils' Alliance" and "First to Fight" - the last of which won the Polish Foreign Ministry History Prize in 2020.
I write mainly about Nazi Germany and wartime Poland, but I fear that might scare some people off, so I'll just call myself a writer of history books.
My current book (published in the UK in August 2023) is "The Forgers", which is the fascinating story of the Ładoś Group - a ring of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists operating out of wartime Switzerland - who were forging Latin American passports to help Jews escape the Holocaust. It is a VERY interesting subject - so I would urge you to get a copy!
I hope you enjoy my books. Any questions or queries or just wholesome praise, do let me know...
The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust's Most Audacious Rescue Operation by Roger Moorhouse is a solid contribution to our knowledge of the Holocaust.
While most books on the Holocaust focus on murderers, The Forgers tries to bring a flicker of light into the darkness, that is, tell a story about Polish diplomats who helped Jews to escape. By issuing Latin American passports and smuggling them to ghettos and occupied cities, representatives of the Polish government in exile must have saved thousands of Jews from deportation to death camps. Fraudulent as it had been, a passport of a country whose name sounded unfamiliar and the language unknown was a saving line: Germans thought Jews with foreign papers were worth the exchange.
As always, Roger Moorhouse delivers an engaging, enlightening story with a writing style somewhere between an academic paper - dates, names, locations, thorough research - and simplified popular science. The Forgers is an excellent starting point for those who want to avoid delving into more profound depths of human barbarity yet still want to know some details. For those knowledgeable about the Holocaust, the bigger frame, which constitutes 80% of the book, may seem repetitious and, thus, redundant. But how can one cut out one piece of the Holocaust without mentioning the others?
Some authors' historical works can be read and listened to without missing vital details or getting bogged down in numbers. That's the case with The Forgers. I 'read' it in an audio version and could finish it in a week.
Roger Moorhouse's The Forgers is an example of a very good book with one flaw that is still well worth your time. The Forgers looks at a cell of Polish diplomats in Switzerland who provided forged documents to thousands of Jewish people facing the worst of the Holocaust. By far the strongest part of this book is Moorhouse's ability to distill the actions and movements during the Holocaust by various groups without losing sight of the unspeakable horror throughout. A significant amount of the book chronicles some of the worst ghettos of World War II and how the acquisition of a forged passport could be the difference between life and death.
The one flaw has directly to do with the title of the book. "The Forgers" is a misnomer. The actual people behind the forging cell take up very little space within the book. Their names are mentioned and we get very short biographies, but most of the book is devoid of their presence. It would be much more accurate to say this book revolves around the actual forgeries as opposed to the forgers. In the end, this flaw does not diminish the book in a truly significant way. The research and writing are top notch and this is well worth a read.
(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Basic Books.)
In Roger Moorhouse’s, The Forgers, the author takes a detailed look at the decimation of the Polish Jews during World War II. Despite the bellicose behavior of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the majority of Western Europe and America chose to turn a blind eye to the treatment of Jews because leadership feared uncontrolled immigration to their own countries. As a result, the Holocaust continued unabated and countless lives were lost. However, a few brave souls would intervene by making false South American passports saving about 3500 lives. This operation may not be well-known but deserves to be told.
The Forgers chronicles in well-researched and devastating detail the Nazi persecution of the Polish Jews and larger Jewish population of Western Europe. It also records the Allies feckless inaction using primary sources. Consequently, the Nazis and the Soviets moved swiftly to eliminate Jews and the Christians who tried to shelter them. Due to the efforts of a few brave souls who worked tirelessly to provide false papers to South America, a few thousand Jews escaped to freedom. The book relays some of these accounts through letters and eye-witness testimony.
The volume does a tremendous job of covering the brutality of the Holocaust. It is mind-numbingly hard to read but a necessary one. Some aspects of history covered in this book are not well known. However, despite introducing the title characters in the beginning and concluding with them at the end, The Forgers’ focus is the elimination of the Jews instead of those that tried to save them. Readers should be alerted of this, or they may be disappointed. Even so, it is still worth the time.
What drew my attention to this book was the forgery to save Jews in Poland. There is very little of this topic in the book which focuses of what happened to Jews and to a lesser extent the Polish themselves when occupied by the Nazis. This is a harrowing narrative and the numbers involved in terms of murders and suffering is eye watering. In fact the numbers are so high it is hard to comprehend and virtually become meaningless. The author obviously did a lot of research in telling a story that has to be told but you have to be ready for it.
Interesting and incredibly sad take on the worldwide collective to forge passports and other legalization documents to save “disowned” (country-less) Jews.
Personally, I prefer Tim Snyder’s excellent “Black Earth” as he delves a bit more into the political reasoning as to why it was important to the Nazi’s to make the Jews “homeless”, while Mr Moorhouse focuses on the aftermath of this homelessness and the lengths people took to rectify.
Well written with the information presented in a way that flowed in an understandable way. There are many parts to juggle! The actual part about the “forgers” was minimal. So, while it may be information that is “unknown” til recently, it’s not what drives the bulk of the book. My issue is that the book’s content, while excellent, doesn’t reflect what is promised in the title: the Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation.
p. 78 German propaganda sought to drive a wedge between the Poles and the Jews to prevent any possible collaboration. "Walls were covered with posters depicting the Jews as repulsive and dangerous criminals or as vampires sucking Polish blood. Special free films were shown that demeaned and ridiculed Jews. Public lectures were held asserting that Jews were immune to typhus but functioned as carriers of the disease and could pass it on to Aryans. It was no wonder so many Poles began to curse the Jews. The already strained relations between Polish Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors were soured further. By the time they entered the ghettos, the Jews were already very much alone. p. 102 ...those arriving from Germany into the ghettos of Minsk, or Riga, had no legal rights at all. They were nonperson, citizens of nowhere. They now inhabited an extralegal space in which there was no obstacle or impediment to their further deportation of extermination. It was for this reason that false papers and forged passports were essential for deported Jews if they were to survive. p.140-41 Yet in the face of incontrovertible evidence, many found the report hard to believe. "it seemed to me so devilish, so horrible, that at first I thought it was exaggerated." "How can we believe the killing of 700,000 people (these were Polish Jews killed). The Americans were dubious of the suggestion of an ongoing genocide - "wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears." They decided to sit on the revelations. [has anything changed? no one really cares how many Jews are killed]. The recent attacks on Oct. 7 in Israel were carried out by 21st century Nazis. p. 170 Surrendering civilians were routinely shot out of hand, bodies left where they fell. A German eyewitness recalled how a young woman emerged from a building with her five children in tow, seeking to escape the carnage. Spotted by an SS man, the group was ordered to stand still, before being mowed down by a hail of machine-gun fire. "There they lay, in the middle of the market square, side by side, as they had stood. Some of the children were still alive; they waved their little arms and we heard their moans. The SS man approached the group, pulled out his pistol and shot the children in the head.... Then he calmy returned whence he had come, as if nothing had happened. Massacres, too, were commonplace. When German forces entered the Jewish hospital in Czyste, they proceeded to work their way through the wards, systematically shooting the patients in their beds. When they were finished they set fire to the building, leaving the remaining patients and staff, who had fled to the basement, to burn to death. p. 173... any suggestion of rescue operations to aid European Jews would be rejected out of hand. Even the sending of aid packages to the camps and ghettos was rejected on the grounds that it represented a diversion of vital resources that would achieve only limited results. A group of Polish underground tried to obtain visas for Jews for South American countries. Some percentage were actually able to use them, most were tricked over and over by the Germans to believe that they would be able to get out of the hellhole.
I read a free advance digital review copy provided by the publisher via Netgalley.
It’s well known that other countries did little to help rescue Jews from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries, even as the war went on and it became clear that failing to help meant near-certain death. But where politicians and bureaucrats refused to help, others stepped in an used whatever methods they could to save Jews. This book focuses on a plan first devised by a Polish attaché in Switzerland to use blank passports and similar forms from other countries, mostly in Latin America, and provide them to Jews trying to escape death.
You might wonder why the Nazis would care about a Jew carrying a passport from a foreign country, considering their view that all Jews should be erased. The idea was that anyone held by the Germans who had a foreign passport should be held for potential exchange for German nationals held overseas or just to be exchanged for money. Some prisoners (Jews and non-Jews) were obvious high-value individuals, such as relatives of prominent foreigners, or well-known names in the arts. Others were ordinary people. Often the Nazis were aware that the Latin American passports weren’t quite legitimate, but as long as the country of issue didn’t disavow them, they were generally honored by the Nazis. Things changed in the last year of the war, but before that, “exchange Jews” were generally far better off than other Jews. One example was Anne Frank’s best friend, Hanneli Goslar. Goslar’s family had Paraguayan passports and were held in a relatively privileged part of the Bergen-Belsen camp until liberated by the Red Army from a transport south at the end of the war. Hanneli was at Belsen a year before Anne Frank arrived, but because Anne Frank had been at Auschwitz and then transported to Belsen with thousands of others to live in appalling conditions, she died while Hanneli lived.
Despite the title, this book’s focus is less on the operators of the passport scheme and more on the wartime experiences of Jews in places like the Warsaw ghetto and later in various camps, from death camps like Treblinka, to Belsen, and detention camps in former hotels, as in the Vittel spa in France. Though Moorhouse’s writing tends to the workmanlike, it’s impossible not to feel the emotions of those in peril and having to gamble for their lives over and over. It’s unknown how many people were saved by the passport scheme, possibly only a few thousand. But the same was true of Oskar Schindler’s efforts, and the forgers deserve as much praise.
The Forgers is another story about the use of forged passports for Jews to save them from the Germans. It doesn't seem to have been an easy process.
Moorhouse was very precise and graphic in the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust. this books relays that thousands of non-Jewish Poles were brutalized and killed also. The author relays the plight of Poland (the book focuses on the take over of Poland), it's Jews and non-Jews and how so many of them plotted against the Germans, many of them dying for their efforts. Their perseverance was astonishing. After finding through sporadic use that forged passports naming Polish Jews as citizens from Paraguay as well as other S. American countries saved many from being shipped off to concentration camps and certain death.
The Lado's Group was formed to facilitate a more elaborate use of foreign passports. Moorhouse told actual stories of Resistance and the people responsible for the aid to many. I vividly remember Moorhouse relating that once when the Germans were rounding up many to transport that the Jews with what little arms that they had resisted the Germans. Of course it turned into a blood bath but the Jews said that they would rather die at their own fate than by the hands of the Germans.
The story of forging actually did not play out in the book until mid-book. The start of the book was more from the historical time line of the war - always interesting but I wanted to know more about the forging operation.
The Forgers showed the hope and never-give-up attitude of Poland, the people that tried to save their country, Jew and non Jew alike, and the people that died at the hands of the Nazi's. Truly interesting.
This story in many ways mirrors how the Japanese council in Lithuania was able to save thousands of Jews by granting them visas to travel through Russia and onto Japan. Saving these people by getting them out of Europe and the hands of the Nazis.
This group was made up by a group in Switzerland that was made up of members of the Polish government in exile prior to the German invasion of September 1939. What makes it all the more amazing is that this group managed to smuggle people out of Poland by getting them passports for countries in Latin America (primarily Paraguay).
For whatever reason, the Germans decided to honor these passports, even though they suspected they were forgeries. They would OK travel by people holding these passports for Germans who were 'stuck' in other countries wanting to go back to Germany.
All in all they probably saved over 10,000 people.
As well researched and written book about a widely unknown rescue to save Jews from undesirable consequences. For those who are avid readers of WW II history, don’t let this one slip by. Polish diplomats working in Switzerland to make a meaningful contribution and impact with no other reason than to save people’s lives as one of the largest Holocaust rescue operations in history. The story gives ample information on the fate of many as they were cast into unbelievable situations where the outcomes were so unexpected to be of a good nature. It also give the places people were sent to as well as the chess game played where the outcomes were not easily explained not understood.
I was disappointed that the story was obscured by the author’s mission to set the full context. This resulted in pages and pages of details about the genocide during World War II. It’s difficult to read under any circumstances, however, particularly when the headline is that the book is about an audacious rescue mission.
The book itself is very thoroughly researched but it lacks the ability to draw the reader into the story.
If you want to get your head around the fascinating history of the use of false passports to remove Jews from deportation lists, just read the Epilogue.
This was what I expected from the blurb. There’s very little about the forgers in here, or the detail behind how they carried it out. There are some interesting stories, asides from the main arc of the book, that convinced me to give this three stars rather than two. It is an unrelenting tale of brutality and genocide, obviously, and that is starkly presented, which is powerful at times. However, I found the prose very dry, and with more of an academic tone than most expected.
Sad but interesting. I learned a lot from this story of forging passports I didn’t even realise that this happened. I think this book is really interesting for those who want to learn more about the resistance of the Jewish community during the Holocaust and the actions of those to help save people.
Um texto muito confuso e que por vezes se torna penoso de ler em razão do enorme número de pessoas cujos nomes são referidos ou cujas histórias são narradas. De facto, só no mesmo epilogo -- relativamente muito curto -- é feita uma síntese que se revela indispensável para se poder ficar com uma ideia da relevância dos factos mencionados.
I stopped reading the book after only about 1/4 of it. The author goes into great detail about the holocaust itself, but I hadn't even encountered much about forging documents yet. I assume the author was laying the groundwork to get to the subject matter, but I lost patience.
Well researched book full of new revelations about efforts to save Jews in World War II. It was interesting to learn about the daring efforts of those in Switzerland who took great risks to issue forged passports (for South American countries) to Polish people who otherwise would have perished. This was no small operation, with an estimated 10,000 forged. I’m glad this story came to light and is being told now.