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.

Prefaced as a book that focuses on a little known story of people who forged fake papers for Jewish people to escape Nazi Germany, this book really focuses on how Jewish people attempted to get out of dangerous areas, the treatment they received in each area before often being sent to a camp. There is definitely a lot of work put into this book, it isn't entirely what I thought it was going to be.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review, but opinions are my own.

Thank you Netgalley and Basic Books for access to this arc.

CW/TW – a large part of the book is spent describing the horrific treatment of Jews, as well as Poles, by the Nazis and Russians during World War II – specifically in occupied Eastern Europe. This includes the occupied countries, ghettos, and internment/concentration/detention camps. This is not sensationalized but is nonetheless graphic in nature.

First let me quibble a bit about the blurb. The actions of those involved in the forged passports is first described as one of the “least known” rescue operations before then being described as “completely unknown.” I’d go with “least known” as over the course of the book, it’s shown that a lot of people, across the globe, *including the Germans* knew what was going on. And while the forgery operation was the basis of the story, the majority of the book is spent delving into the context (which is covered in the CW/TW above) of what drove the Polish legation staff in Bern to do what they did. Word reached the officials in Bern about what was going on and they humanly acted to try and save as many Jews as possible.

This is not an easy book to read and I think that is because what is told is not sensationalized. The matter of fact style makes it all the more horrific and chilling. A lot of time is devoted to how Poland was partitioned and how the people stuck in the various sections were treated by both the Germans and the Russians. Take your pick but neither was easy to survive as the invaders subjected the Polish people to massive indignities, repression, humiliations, loss of property, loss of their culture, and death.

The documents that were made and smuggled back to the people desperate for a lifeline that might save them from Treblinka and Auschwitz – among others – were not used as I had imagined – as actual travel documents. Rather they were a means to elevate the status of those Jews to one that the Germans would acknowledge and, potentially, exploit. Under the Nuremberg Laws and later when Poland was partitioned, Jews lost their citizenship. But with a (mostly Latin American) foreign passport or a Honduran promesa, these people could claim a country again. The means by which German exploitation could help them lay in the fact that Germany was willing to exchange these “foreign” citizens for their own German citizens who had been trapped in other countries when the war started. Later in the war, Germany was (mostly) willing to hold (most of) these people apart from ones who were sent to the death camps, depending on their country of origin.

Did everyone jump at the chance to get a foreign passport? Actually, no. Plenty of people were suspicious for various reasons of the worth of documents and the process of obtaining them. Were they any good? Would stepping forward and showing them to the Germans be a means to salvation or just get these people on the next transport? One leader of a ghetto decided that he wanted to be the one in charge of deciding who got one and threatened to rat to the Germans about it if anyone tried to bypass his authority.

As the war continued and appeals were made worldwide to anyone who might assist the operation, sand got dumped in the Vaseline. Some of the countries whose (Swiss) honorary consuls in Bern (it wasn’t just the Poles doing this) were issuing passports or (easier to manage quickly) promesas initially balked at recognizing these irregularly issued documents – many in fear of being inundated by Jewish immigrants. Some diplomats and foreign service officers nitpicked at the legality of them and pressure was brought to bear to both support or disavow the documents’ legitimacy. Some countries eventually agreed to recognize the documents, some waffled and others flatly refused.

In the aftermath of the war, the Polish diplomats involved neither sought nor received recognition for what they had done. The whole exercise was consigned to obscurity. It’s also difficult to know how many lives were actually saved. An estimated 2-3,000 persons might have survived because of the documents which often were a means of evading a transport for a few more months or being put in a more favored section of Bergen-Belsen. In addition to the documents, a great deal of luck determined who lived. There was actually (finally) an exchange towards the end of the war in which roughly 300 document holders were sent via train to Switzerland – though tragically many died of health conditions on the way.

I’ll end with an excerpt from the book – Heinz Lichtenstern, whose story opened this book, never knew where his Paraguayan passport had come from, and he always considered it to be a last resort, a final throw of the dice. Yet it would undoubtedly save not only his life but also those of his wife and children. In the more than four decades that remained to him, he would continue his career as a metals trader and become a grandfather and a great-grandfather. He was but one of the many the ?ado? Group helped to save. Others would go on to be academics, rabbis, engineers, politicians, mathematicians, historians, and journalists—and in their time mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers—every one of them living proof of the Talmud saying that “he who saves one life, saves the world entire.” B

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.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4

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.

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.)