THE FORGER OF PARIS
Adolfo’s name was sometimes spelled Adolphe. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Jewish Russian emigrants. His mother was Anna Kinoel and his father was Salomon Kaminsky, a tailor. Adolfo had two brothers and a sister.
As a child Adolfo wanted to be a painter.
Adolfo’s parents had grown up in Russia and both were members of the ‘Bund’ a Jewish worker’s union. His father worked as a journalist on a Jewish-Marxist newspaper. His parents were exiled and only met each other in Paris in 1916.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the couple were thrown out of France as ‘Suspicious Reds’. They went to Argentina.
When Adolfo was seven, the family moved back to Paris, during the Great Depression.
A few years later, they moved to Vire in the Calvados region of Normandy, where his father opened a shop. The Kaminsky family lived in his uncle’s large house.
Upon leaving school, Adolfo’s first job was working in a dye shop. He became fascinated with the chemical process behind creating colours. “I discovered the magic of colour.”
At a flea market, Adolfo bought a paper written by Marcellin Berthelot, a nineteenth-century chemist who specialised in thermochemicals – the method of creating organic compounds.
Berthelot was labelled, ‘One of the most famous chemists in the world.’
Inspired, Adolfo set up a laboratory in his uncle’s house – and began experimenting.
He briefly worked at manufacturing parts for the planes of the French air force, before being employed in a dairy factory as an assistant to their chemist. He taught Adolfo everything he knew about chemistry.
When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the Kaminsky family home was seized.
One of Adolfo’s colleagues at the factory, Jean Beyer, was executed.
Adolfo was enraged. He was approached by his local friendly pharmacist who was secretly manufacturing detonators for the French Resistance. Adolfo became his assistant.
He also started to monitor Vire railway station. It was here that all the materials that the Todt Organisation used to build Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, were loaded onto trains.
Adolfo recorded everything he saw and sent the information to London.
His uncle assaulted a Nazi officer and was forced to flee to Paris, where Adolfo’s older brother, Paul lived.
Adolfo’s mother, Anna, rushed to Paris to warn Paul that there might be danger. On the way home she was murdered – thrown off the train by a German soldier.
Adolfo was inconsolable.
Shortly afterwards, the whole Kaminsky family were arrested and sent to Drancy holding camp in the north east of Paris, where they spent the next three months, prior to deportation. Adolfo lost an enormous amount of weight.
In Drancy, the family became close to a gentleman and his daughter, Dora. The man died in the camp and Dora became Adolfo’s closest friend.
The Kaminsky family were only rescued because brother Paul (who was still at large) contacted the Argentinian Consul, who intervened and successfully got them all out.
They tried to pretend Dora was one of their family – without success.
A day later they were all re-arrested and sent back to Drancy but were released the following day.
Adolfo didn’t want to leave. He wanted to show solidarity with the other inmates, as well as staying with Dora. His father told him he could do more good on the outside than on the inside.
They were very lucky. Most of the inmates at Drancy were sent to Auschwitz, including Dora, who died there.
Adolfo later said, “Time has not erased the immense feeling of guilt it has left me with.”
Adolfo moved into temporary accommodation alongside other people who had lost their homes. One of these was the father of Michel Drucker, a French television personality.
Worried his father might be re-arrested, Adolfo tried to obtain false identity papers for him.
This put him in contact with ‘La Sixieme’, a Jewish resistance organisation.
This group were trying to forge German documents but were not very successful as they were having problems with their Waterman blue ink, which was proving impossible to remove from documents. They were doing this to remove the word ‘Jew’ from ID cards. It was thought the ink was indelible.
Adolfo showed them how to get rid of the ink – by using lactic acid. An agent nicknamed ‘Penguin’ was so impressed that he persuaded La Sixieme to invite him to join them.
After a rigorous ‘interrogation’, he was set a challenge – create false papers for himself. Adolfo took the pseudonym, Julien Keller, a photographer from the Alsace region of France.
The other members of the resistance group could not believe how realistic this false identity was.
Adolfo was immediately put in charge of their underground chemical forgery laboratory on the Paris Left Bank, at 17 Rue St Peres, above a photography shop, which he ran – the perfect cover for having all the forgery materials at hand.
Adolfo managed to forge the watermark on official papers – something they had previously been unable to master.
He also taught himself the skill of photogravure (the art of replicating photographs), which made his “real-false” documents invaluable to the Resistance.
Adolfo also learned how to forge official rubber stamps.
Very quickly, the Kaminsky Laboratory became the principal supplier of forged documents for all of Northern France and the Benelux countries.
The Nazis knew someone was creating these false documents. They called him ‘The Paris Forger’ and launched intensive searches to find him.
Adolfo knew the risks. He knew he would be executed if caught. The closest he came to arrest was being stopped by a guard one winter evening. He was carrying false papers and material to a delivery.
The guard asked what was in his bag. Adolfo replied, “My sandwiches. Would you like one?” The guard walked away laughing.
As well as identity papers, Adolfo forged ration books and birth certificates, changing the surnames of Jews to make them sound more western.
Adolfo worked exceptionally hard and taught himself how to survive days without sleep. He said, “Stay awake. As long as possible. Struggle against sleep. The calculation is easy. In one hour, I make thirty papers. If I sleep one hour, thirty people will die.”
Adolfo was most proud of forging 900 papers in just three days, that enabled 300 children, living in institutions, to escape from the Nazis. He said he had given them, “The license to live.”
At his height, Adolfo was producing around 500 documents a week.
“On every document rests the life or death of a human being.”
It is estimated that his forgeries saved the lives of fourteen thousand people during the war.
Immediately Paris was liberated, Adolfo signed up for the French army and entered Germany, where the French Secret Service recruited him.
They were sending spies behind the lines of the retreating German army and needed false papers for them. They were trying to collate evidence about the concentration camps that the Nazis were hastily dismantling.
Post-war, Adolfo forged documents for Jewish people trying to enter the British-controlled mandate of Palestine. He did some work for ‘Irgun’ and ‘Lehi’, the anti-British militant guerilla groups who were waging war on what they considered to be occupiers.
When Israel was formed as a nation in 1948, Adolfo stopped working for them, as he criticised what he saw as the creation of a religious state.
In 1950, Adolfo married Jeanine Korngold. They had two children, Marthe and Serge, but she divorced him in 1952 because he was never at home, always disappearing on his clandestine activities.
He was still a photographer for the French army but resigned when the war in Indochina began because he did not approve of colonial wars.
Adolfo set up his own photography shop in Paris – and became highly respected. “To overcome loneliness, I plunged body and soul into photography. Every night I would climb onto Paris rooftops to catch the city in slumber.”
When the war in Algeria began in 1954, Adolfo began working for the FLN (the National Liberation Front of Algeria). He also supplied false papers to draft dodgers in France. All of this was produced from his secret laboratory in Paris.
Adolfo also assisted the Jeanson network, a French left-wing group dedicated to Algerian independence.
In 1962, Adolfo created a cubic metre of forged 100 Franc notes – to the value of 100 million French Francs.
The aim was to flood the market, destabilise the currency and bring the economy crashing down.
However, before the Francs could be used the war ended. Adolfo immediately burned all the forgeries. “It never entered our heads to keep the notes. Money always leads to problems.”
Between 1963 and 1971, Adolfo helped left-wing movements throughout Latin America and Africa. He also used his talents to assist people resisting Franco’s regime in Spain, Salazar in Portugal and the Colonels in Greece.
Adolfo’s final forged identity papers came in 1971. He was asked to make passports for anti-apartheid guerillas in South Africa. However, part-way through the commission, he sensed a trap and abandoned the project. He suspected (but could never conclusively prove) that the South African secret police were behind the commission.
Adolfo was increasingly disillusioned by the violent actions of some of the left-wing organisations that he worked for, and so, he retired from forgery and moved to Algeria.
He married a local woman, Leila Bendjebour, the daughter of an Imam. They had a daughter, Sarah, and two sons, Atahualpa and Jose-Yousef. The latter became a well-known rapper known as ‘Roce’.
Throughout his career, Adolfo never asked for any payment and usually refused expenses too. He made a living by pursuing his photography career. “Most forgers do it for money. I did it so others could survive. Call me a humanist forger.”
In 1982, the family moved back to France on a (genuine) temporary residence permit.
Ten years later, the whole family received French citizenship.
Adolfo’s son, Serge, from his first marriage, died in 2012.
For a long time, Adolfo kept quiet about what he had done in the post-war years, for fear of reprisals from the French authorities.
Nevertheless, he ultimately received many medals including the Medal of Resistance.
His daughter, Sarah, only learned about her father’s past when as a schoolgirl, she tried to forge her mother’s signature. After a severe telling off from Leila, she noticed Adolfo laughing. He said, “But really Sarah, you could have worked harder. Can’t you see it’s too small?”
He then went on to tell her about his past. Sarah said, “He always taught us to be respectful of the law so we couldn’t believe that he was involved in illegal activity.”
Sarah became an actress and author, writing a biography of him entitled ‘Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life’.
There was also a documentary film made about him called ‘Forging Identity’. He was asked about his motivation. “All humans are equal whatever their origins, their beliefs, their skin colour. There are no superiors, no inferiors. That is not acceptable for me.”
Adolfo also said, “I’ve had a very happy life, with an adorable wife and children; truly something to be proud of. But there are so many corpses. If I hadn’t been able to do anything, I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.”
In old age, Adolfo went blind in one eye, caused by years of close-up work that he had done.
Adolfo died in his own Paris flat, aged ninety seven.
RIP – Resistance Impressed (with) Photos
