The Forgers

Starred review from August 21, 2023
Historian Moorhouse (Poland 1939) recounts in this immersive chronicle the story of Polish diplomat Aleksander Lados and his colleagues in Bern, Switzerland, who provided fake travel documents to more than eight thousand Jewish people attempting to escape Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII. By 1941, a black market in forged travel documents had emerged in Europe, and Rudolf Hugli, a notary and honorary consul for Paraguay in Switzerland, began issuing and selling fake Paraguayan passports. Working with Hugli, Lados and his staff, who represented Poland’s government in exile, became the center of a network of Polish and Jewish activists distributing the documents. The scheme lasted until 1943, when international diplomatic pressure put an end to the operation. (American diplomats were one of the leading voices urging Swiss authorities to shut down the passport pipeline, citing wartime espionage risks.) Lados and his band died in postwar obscurity; the story only became publicly known in 2017, when a Jewish guest of the Polish ambassador in Switzerland described the site as a “holy place,” prompting an inquiry into the forgotten history. Moorhouse expertly places the exploits of the Lados Group in the context of both the horrific Nazi violence against Jewish people and foreign governments’ callous indifference. The result is a captivating narrative of heroism and an illuminating account of the international diplomatic response to the Holocaust.