10 Daring Deceptions That Helped Save Lives in World War II

We tend to file forgers under criminals. In occupied Europe, that filing was backwards when Nazi authorities controlled the registries. False identity cards, passports, and citizenship papers could open a hole in a system built to track and deport people. But deception wasn’t confined to paperwork. A U.S. Army unit built a phantom force from inflatable tanks and fake radio traffic. Two Polish doctors invented a typhus outbreak using dead bacteria. A Polish officer entered Auschwitz under another man’s name.

The methods ranged from borrowed letterhead to rubber tanks. The aim was to make the enemy believe something false long enough to save lives—whether by shielding civilians from deportation and forced labor or drawing German troops away from an Allied crossing. The death toll of World War II is famous. The deceptions that helped people survive it are less so.

Related: 10 of the Most Ingenious Deception Tactics Used in War

10 The Amsterdam Forgery Workshop

The Persoonsbewijzencentrale, or Identity Card Center, was one of the Dutch resistance’s largest forgery workshops. Founded by sculptor Gerrit van der Veen, it supplied false identity papers to people at risk under Nazi occupation. Beginning in 1942, its members created roughly 65,000 forged identity documents and tens of thousands of other papers.

The group also stole blank identity cards and ration coupons, which gave its forgers authentic materials to work with. In March 1943, members took part in an attack on Amsterdam’s population registry. The raid’s participants were arrested. The following year, other members tried to break them out of Weteringschans prison. Most of the group, including van der Veen, were eventually shot.^[1]

9 The Army Built Out of Rubber

The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, better known as the Ghost Army, was a U.S. Army unit of 1,100 men whose weapons included inflatable tanks, sound trucks, fake radio traffic, and uniforms for units that did not exist. Many of its members were artists recruited from schools in New York and Philadelphia.

In March 1945, near Viersen, the unit pretended to be two full divisions—about 30,000 soldiers—to mislead German forces about where and when the Ninth Army would cross the Rhine. The Ghost Army’s multimedia deceptions helped draw German attention away from the real crossing and are credited with saving thousands of Allied lives. Its story remained classified for decades, and Congress awarded the unit the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022.^[2]

8 The Police Chief Who Issued False IDs

When German forces took control of Athens in September 1943, Jewish residents faced the threat of deportation. The city police, under the direction of chief Angelos Evert, issued false identity cards to Jews who requested them. The papers gave them Greek Christian names and identified their religion as Greek Orthodox, making them difficult to distinguish from other residents.

The official documents helped Jewish people hide in plain sight. A special file was also created to record Jews who had been baptized as Christians to escape persecution. By the end of the war, 560 Athenian Jews and refugees from other cities who had found shelter in Athens had survived while posing as Orthodox Christians.^[3]

7 The Diplomats Who Typed 10,000 Paraguayans Into Existence

From Bern, Switzerland, a group of Polish diplomats and Jewish representatives forged South American passports for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The operation was led by Polish ambassador Aleksander Ładoś and included consul Konstanty Rokicki, who helped produce the documents, as well as Jewish activists who gathered names and helped fund the work.

The passports identified their holders as citizens of neutral countries, including Paraguay, Peru, Haiti, and Honduras. That status could protect them from immediate deportation to killing centers. Estimates suggest the group issued between 8,000 and 10,000 documents. Thousands of people whose names appeared on the passports were spared deportation, though the papers could not guarantee their safety.^[4]

6 The Bishop Who Lent His Palace to a Forgery Lab

In the summer of 1943, Moussa Abadi, a scholar of medieval literature, warned the bishop of Nice that the city’s Jews were in danger of deportation. Bishop Paul Rémond gave Abadi and his partner, Jewish physician Odette Rosenstock, a place to work and opened Catholic institutions across the diocese to Jewish children.

Working under the code name Monsieur Marcel, Abadi and Rosenstock created false papers and found safe placements for children in schools, convents, and other institutions. Their Marcel Network is credited with saving 527 Jewish children between 1943 and 1945.^[5]

5 The Man Who Turned Jews Into Salvadorans

George Mandel was a Jewish businessman who found an unlikely ally in José Arturo Castellanos, El Salvador’s consul general in Geneva. In 1942, Castellanos appointed Mandel first secretary of the consulate, and Mandel adopted the more Spanish-sounding surname Mantello.

From that office, the two men issued documents identifying thousands of European Jews as citizens of El Salvador. The certificates could give their holders a claim to protection as citizens of a neutral country, potentially changing how authorities treated them. They did not offer a simple escape from occupied Europe, but they gave people facing deportation another layer of protection.^[6]

4 The Officer Who Entered Auschwitz Under an Assumed Name

Witold Pilecki volunteered to enter Auschwitz and report on conditions inside the camp. To do so, he used the identity of Tomasz Serafiński, a Polish reserve officer. Pilecki had found Serafiński’s identity card in a Warsaw apartment where he was hiding and used the name when the Germans arrested him during a roundup in September 1940.

The camp registered Pilecki as prisoner 4859. He spent more than two and a half years there, organizing a resistance network and sending reports about the camp to the Polish underground. He escaped in April 1943 and later wrote a fuller account of what he had witnessed.^[7]

3 The Doctors Who Forged a Plague

Polish physicians Eugeniusz Łazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz found a way to make healthy people appear to have typhus. They injected patients with inactivated Proteus bacteria, which could trigger a positive result on the Weil-Felix test, then used the test results to report a typhus outbreak to German authorities.

Germans feared the highly contagious disease, so the false epidemic helped protect Polish villagers from forced labor roundups. A 2025 medical review found the method plausible, while correcting a persistent legend: claims that the doctors saved thousands of Jews are unsupported. The people protected by the scheme were Polish villagers, and the number saved remains uncertain.^[8]

2 The Businessman Who Invented a Visa to an Island Nobody Could Reach

In 1940, Jan Zwartendijk was working for Philips in Kaunas, Lithuania, when he became the acting Dutch consul. Jewish refugees needed a destination visa to leave the country, so Zwartendijk wrote in their passports that they did not need a visa to enter Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island. The wording offered a possible destination even though entry to Curaçao still depended on permission from its governor.

Zwartendijk issued at least 2,345 of these endorsements. Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara, whose office was also in Kaunas, supplied transit visas to Japan. Together, their paperwork allowed thousands of refugees to travel across the Soviet Union and onward to Japan.^[9]

1 The Forger Who Could Not Sleep

Adolfo Kaminsky was a teenager working in a dry cleaner’s shop and a dairy laboratory when he realized that the chemistry he used to remove stains could also erase identifying marks from documents. The French Resistance recruited him to make false identity papers for Jews trying to escape arrest and deportation.

Kaminsky’s hidden workshop became one of the largest suppliers of forged documents in France, producing as many as 500 papers a week. The resistance used them to help people disappear, including children who needed new identities. Kaminsky is credited with helping save as many as 14,000 people.^[10]