Max Fuchs’ fake identity card

Throughout the Second World War in Europe, rigorous administration enabled occupying Nazi regimes to identify, deport and exterminate millions of Jews and anyone else deemed undesirable. A new identity could mean avoiding persecution. Forged documents could make the difference between life and death. The procedure to provide a person with a new identity was more or less the same throughout occupied Europe, but the difficulty of the task could vary from place to place. For example, Belgian ID cards were known to be relatively easy to forge, while in eastern Europe the German occupying forces imposed new forms of identity documents with added protective measures such as fingerprints. Although clandestine organisations and individuals took enormous risks to save lives, they were not always successful, as the administrative mechanisms and deportation system set up by the Third Reich proved to be very effective. That was the fate of Max Fuchs. Although this fake identity card was found together with many other personal documents in the attic of the Brussels house where he had been hiding, it did not help him survive the war. He was arrested in early 1944, as the war was approaching its end, and sent to the Kazerne Dossin transit camp in Mechelen. He was deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz in the XXIV transport, one of the last transports, on 4 April 1944. Out of the 626 deportees in this transport, only 147 survived. He was not one of the survivors.