← Back to the front page

Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

22. Becoming A Resistance Forger

In 1943, Adolfo Kaminsky’s family was rounded up and interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only spared at the last minute, due to intervention from the Argentinean consul. In the meantime, Adolfo joined the French Resistance at age 16. Sent by his father to pick up forged identity papers from a Resistance cell, he discovered that they faced difficulties with a particular dye. The precocious chemist gave them a solution off the top of his head that immediately solved their problem.

Impressed, the Resistance recruited him and put him to work in an underground laboratory in Paris. There, he spent the rest of the war forging identity papers for those on the run from the Nazis and in need of fake ID, particularly Jews.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.