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Remarkable Heroes and Heroines of the French Resistance in World War II

Khalid Elhassan May 12, 2025 18 min

Resistance - Women and men of the French Resistance — Women and men of the French Resistance. Pegasus Battlefield Tours

12. This Kid’s Gift For Chemistry Was a Godsend to the Resistance

Adolfo Kaminsky with camera and chemicals used to forge documents. Spiegel

Sent by his father to pick up forged identity papers from a Resistance cell, Kaminsky discovered that they had trouble removing a particular dye. The precocious chemist gave them a solution off the top of his head that immediately solved their problem. Impressed, the Resistance put him to work in an underground laboratory in Paris.

He spent the rest of WWII working out of a secret laboratory in Paris. He specialized in forging documents for those on the run from the Nazis and in need of fake IDs, particularly Jews. By war’s end, he had produced fake documents that helped save over 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children, from the Holocaust.

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.