Moorehouse

The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation by Roger Moorhouse (2023)

During World War II, while the horrors of the Holocaust were raging, a group of Polish diplomats provided thousands of endangered Jews with false papers, such as passports and other “evidence of citizenship” to countries in South America. These documents saved countless people from the slaughter by the German National Socialists. The story of how these men pulled this feat off was forgotten by history until recently.

The butchery of the Nazi program to eradicate Jews and other “undesirables” has been written about and studied for decades. I cannot add anything new. In this book, Moorhouse focuses mostly on the situation in Poland. Trapped between Germany and the Soviet Union, Jewish and Gentile Poles were brutalized by both. Those who did whatever they could to save whomever they could deserve every praise directed to them.

The Holocaust is one of those events in history that no matter how much you read about it, it’s shocking every single time. How do you fully grasp what happened? I don’t think “evil” is the right word to describe it. It was satanic. The lengths the Nazis went to deceive their victims and the world is unfathomable. The Holocaust wasn’t just murder, the perpetrators enjoyed torturing their victims, too.

The story The Forgers tells is of a race against time and death, and the conflict between those who tried to do something and those who preferred to do nothing. Centered in neutral Switzerland, the team worked with networks, resistance groups, and more to get documents to those in danger. Moorhouse outlines how the operation started small — families in Poland begging relatives in Switzerland to send them papers that will help them escape. He describes how the fake documents had no real official backing. They were issued out of desperation with the hope that they might stall a recipient’s deportation just long enough. Moorhouse also details resistance to the program by the countries from which the passports “came”. Many declared citizenships from South American countries without those countries’ knowledge or blessing. When they finally became aware of it, many of these governments tried to shut the program down. As a result, the Forgers were fighting both the killers on one side and unconcerned politicians on the other.

This book is intense. Moorhouse uses eye-witness testimony from those who lived through the Holocaust, both victims and perpetrators. The stories these people tell had me shaking my head more than once. I could only read this book in small doses because it is so heartbreaking. Moorhouse doesn’t sugar-coat anything. He savages anyone who deserves it. Along with the Germans, he also goes after the Soviets for being just as brutal in Poland, the Poles for taking it out on their Jewish neighbors, the Allied Nations for ignoring the warnings and later evidence of the Massacre, and the South Americans and Swiss for trying to stop the forgery program. No one gets off.

One of The Forgers more interesting sections talks about the “Exchange Jew” program. This was completely new to me. Moorhouse explains that the Nazis wanted to get rid of Jews and they didn’t care how. They just wanted them gone. To the Nazi, exportation was just as good as extermination. The Germans realized that they could ransom Jews to the Allies for prisoners of war or other “captive” Germans, which could include ethnic Germans living abroad. The Nazis were willing to trade Jews holding South American passports for them. They rounded them up and put them in holding camps for impending transport. This was how the South Americans found out about the program, resulting in it being shut down for a time. This stranded many of these Jews. Since the Germans couldn’t ship them out anymore, they killed them instead. By the time the Forgers got the program reinstated, it was too late for many.

This book is mind-blowing. Efforts by the Forgers were selfless and extraordinary. They risked their reputations and careers. None were compensated for their work and were forgotten after the War. One died in poverty. Through his research, Moorhouse discovers that relatively few Jews were actually saved by the program out of the tens-of-thousands who received the papers. The Forgers were fighting the Holocaust itself. Each document’s effectiveness depended on whether individual Nazi bureaucrats chose to honor papers of which they were already suspicious possessed by people they despised, and on the cooperation of foreign governments who didn’t think the Holocaust was their problem. In the end, the program’s success should not be determined by the actual numbers of lives saved, but in its intent. These men tried. That the papers helped anyone survive at all was a miracle.