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Adolfo Kaminsky, resistance worker who forged identity documents for Jews in the Second World War – obituary

Adolfo Kaminsky, who has died aged 97, was a forger of documents who, particularly during the Second World War, operating from an underground laboratory at 17 Rue des St Pères, Paris, forged identity papers for Jews and others fleeing from the Nazis. 

Adolfo Kaminsky, 2012 - Alamy© Alamy

He was a member of the French Resistance, responsible for the chemical forgery lab. Hard-working, he used to say: “Keep awake. Struggle against sleep. The calculation is easy. In one hour, I make 30 false papers. If I sleep one hour, 30 people will die.” 

He was a highly skilled draughtsman, creating passports from scratch; he made a machine to make them look older. But it was stressful work. “The smallest error and you send someone to prison or death,” he once said. “It’s a great responsibility. It’s heavy. It’s not at all a pleasure”.  

Eake documents made by Kaminsky during the Second World War - JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images© Provided by The Telegraph

Over the course of the war, he became the central figure in a vast network that provided false identity papers to some 14,000 Jewish men, women and children throughout Nazi occupied Paris.

In August 1944 Paris was liberated and Kaminsky joined the French Army. He was then sent to Germany to assist the French military secret services in counterfeiting documents for agents sent across the lines. That was technically more difficult, as he recalled, “because the German documents were more advanced”. But being such a skilled forger, he created amazing facsimile documents of the Third Reich.

He was born into a Jewish family in Buenos Aires on October 1 1925, one of four children of Salomon Kaminsky, originally from Russia, and Anna from Georgia.

In 1932, the Kaminskis emigrated to Paris, but six years later moved again, to the town of Vire in Calvados, where his uncle lived, and young Adolfo was apprenticed to a clothes dyer, a precursor to the modern dry cleaner. He spent hours figuring out how to remove stains, then read chemistry textbooks and did experiments at home. “My boss was a chemical engineer, and would answer all of my questions”, he recalled.

In exchange for butter, he took a weekend job as a chemist’s assistant at a dairy where, to measure the fat content of cream, the chemist would add methylene blue to a sample and wait for the lactic acid to dissolve the colour. In this way Adolfo learnt that lactic acid could erase Waterman Blue, the supposedly indelible ink used on ID and ration cards.

In December 1940, Adolfo’s mother died in mysterious circumstances, falling from the Paris-Granville train. Aged 17, Kaminsky joined the Resistance, first as a watcher at the railway station in Vire, from where trains of the Todt Organisation, an engineering group named after its founder, Fritz Todt, a senior Nazi figure, loaded raw material.

It was destined for building the Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of coastal defence constructed by Germany along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia as a defence against an anticipated Allied invasion. Kaminsky’s mission was to keep an eye on the railway station and dispatch reports to someone in London with details about Todt’s trains and their cargo.

On October 22 1943, Solomon Kaminsky and his children were interned in Drancy, the internment camp for Jews near Paris where they were locked up before being deported to Auschwitz. They were freed thanks to Solomon’s Argentine nationality, but had to stay at Drancy for three months.

Kaminsky remembered a maths professor who had agreed to tutor him in the camp. “One day, when it was time for our classes, he wasn’t there. He hadn’t wanted to tell me beforehand that his name was on the list.”

An idealist from a young age, Adolfo wanted to stay in the camp out of solidarity with the others who were slated for transport. But, as he recalled, “My father said: ‘No, there are more important things you can do on the outside’. He had no idea what my job would be within a few weeks.” 

On December 22 1943, the family returned to Paris. Fearing that it was only a matter of time before they were rearrested, Adolfo was sent to secure documents from a Jewish resistance group that would disguise the fact that they were Jews. When told that the group was having difficulty erasing blue ink from official documents, he told them to use lactic acid. It worked, and he was invited to join the group – though not before being interrogated rigorously for loyalty. 

Then to assess his skills as a forger Kaminsky was instructed to forge an ID card for himself. “All I had to do,” he recalled, “was to copy all the fields meticulously... But I was very tense, I don’t know why. I will never forget the dim room, the smell of the wooden table that was lit by a small lamp, the pen and the inkwell.” 

False passport made by Adolfo Kaminsky - Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images© Provided by The Telegraph

He used the name “Julien Keller” on his false papers, and that was the name he kept until the liberation of Paris. In parallel, he worked for the Jewish resistance, La Sixième (the clandestine branch of the Les Eclaireurs Israélites de France, or EIF) and the Organisation juive de combat, operating their chemical forgery lab.

After the war, in December 1946, which was the beginning of the First Indochina War, in which French troops fought against the Viet Minh, he resigned from the French military, unwilling to collaborate with what he regarded as a colonial war.

From 1946 until 1948, Kaminsky forged identity papers for the Haganah, the Jewish underground militia in British Mandated Palestine, to facilitate clandestine Jewish emigration to Palestine in defiance of British laws restricting the number of Jews allowed in.

But when, on May 14 1948, the State of Israel was declared, Kaminsky was disappointed and refused to emigrate to there, as he would not live in a state that chooses, as he put it, “religion and individualism, because that represented everything I hate”. He wanted Israel to be “a communal, collectivist and … secular state”, believing that this would “cement peaceful co-existence”.

Instead of emigrating to Israel, as many of his friends did, Kaminsky stayed in Paris, becoming a photographer. “All my friends had left,” he recalled, “and, to overcome loneliness, I plunged body and soul into photography. Every night, I would climb onto Paris rooftops to catch the city in slumber.” He specialised in producing large-scale prints, illustrations for postcards, reproductions of artworks, advertising photos, but also photo reportage on industry such as the coal mines and sugar refineries.  

These activities, however, served as a cover for his work as a forger, as Kaminsky – known only as “the technician” – continued to forge papers for various groups, including the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN), which fought for independence in Algeria. In 1962 Kaminsky counterfeited money for the FLN; the idea being to flood France with false 100-franc notes in order to destabilise the French currency and the economy and, thus, pressurising the government to withdraw its troops from Algeria.

“Counterfeiting money is not harder or less hard than forging other documents”, Kaminsky explained in an interview. “The difficulty lies in the fact that you have to create large quantities. One ID card means one person, and 10 ID cards mean 10 people. But when it comes to money you need millions, otherwise it’s worthless. After all, you don’t counterfeit notes to buy eggs at the grocery store.”

In March 1962, however, before the fake notes got into circulation, the government of Charles de Gaulle signed the Evian Accords, which put an end to the war and gave Algeria its independence. When the ceasefire was declared, the notes were burnt in a huge bonfire. Kaminsky’s daughter recalled that when she was writing her father’s biography (Adolfo Kaminsky, une vie de faussaire, 2009), she asked him: “Dad, you were always penniless and sometimes you barely had enough to eat, so wasn’t it hard to burn all that money?” He replied: “It was very hard … the fake notes didn’t burn well.”

He continued to assist various Leftist movements in Latin America, Africa, Portugal (then under Salazar’s dictatorship) and Francoist Spain, and he made false ID papers for American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. Always driven by principles, he took no payment for his work. “Most forgers do it for money,” he once said. “I did it so that others could survive. Call me a humanist forger.” 

Adolfo Kaminsky poses with a Lorillon camera at his home in Paris - JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images© Provided by The Telegraph

In 1971 Kaminsky stopped forging documents, convinced that too many different groups and people knew his identity, and that he would soon be caught and imprisoned; afterwards, he devoted his time to practising and teaching photography. That year, he moved to Algeria, where, in 1974 he married Leila Bendjebour, the daughter of a liberal Algerian imam, with whom he returned to live in France in 1982 when Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise in Algeria.

Adolfo Kaminsky was awarded the Croix du Combattant, Croix du combatant volontaire de la Resistance, and the Médaille de Vermeil de la ville de Paris for his activities during the resistance to the German occupation.

In 2019-2020, an exhibition opened at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris titled, “Adolfo Kaminsky: Forger and Photographer”, whose purpose was “to pay tribute to a figure of the Resistance whose remarkable photography has been largely ignored due to his illegal activities and partly clandestine existence”.

A small man with a long white beard, Kaminsky lived in a modest apartment for people with low incomes, not far from his former laboratory in Paris. The wartime work put such a strain on his vision that he eventually went blind in one eye.

Adolfo Kaminsky is survived by his wife, by their two sons and a daughter, and by a daughter from a brief earlier marriage. A son from that marriage predeceased him.