Annual Members Meeting
Life for citizens in WWII-era France was one of privation—and was also awash in official documents. As the country was carved up into zones both free and occupied, people were required to carry identification at all times. Town halls and police prefecture kept current records; all employers, from the largest companies to small shops, issued proof of employment. And every document was signed, witnessed, and stamped (often multiple times) in a bureaucratic system that created endless paperwork.
Those who found themselves in danger of arrest and deportation needed access to “dossiers” of false papers, whether they planned to flee the country or hide in plain sight. Organizations that aided Jews and other refugees quickly recognized the need for forged documents, and began to build networks of those with the skills to create them. Some forgers, such as Adolfo Kaminsky in Paris and Oscar Rosowsky in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, used their training in chemistry and typewriter repair to adapt or invent methods of document alteration and reproduction that helped to save the lives of thousands of individuals.
Early forgery techniques involved hand-carving replicas of official seals and stamps. Members of La Sixieme recount clandestinely slicing out scraps of the linoleum flooring beneath their seats in subway cars to carve later. More detailed originals were nearly impossible to replicate until two existing technologies were adapted to change the game: stencil duplicators and photoengraving.
This talk is the result of three years of research: handling forged materials at the offsite archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; looking at forgers’ own collections of purloined stamps and seals on microfiche at the Musée de la Shoah in Paris; and visiting the small town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Rosowsky set up his printing workshop in a stone barn, warmed in the winter by cows. She will present the work of some of the best-known French forgers and discuss the printing techniques they adapted to create documents that looked genuine enough to pass inspection under life-or-death circumstances.
