The same-day forgery service that fooled Nazis
Declassified documents show sophistication of counterfeiters operating from Essex country house
FROM The Great Escape to Secret Army, the task of forging documents for runaway Pows and resistance fighters is portrayed in many a wartime drama as a slow and painstaking one, using ad hoc materials in the most difficult of circumstances.
But the British operation to create documents for its agents and allies was in fact a highly sophisticated affair, run along the lines of a modern same-day delivery service.
Indeed, so slick was the work of the forgers that they would often produce copies from original documents that were stolen from the Nazis and returned before their absence was even noticed. Little was known about this work until the recent release of hundreds of formerly classified wartime documents.
It can now be revealed that the forgers operated from an isolated 17th century country house called Briggens, in rural Essex, near Harlow.
Now the site of a golf club, it was here, at what was code-named Station XIV, that the Special Operations Executive (SOE) produced 275,000 forgeries, including passports, ration cards and cash.
Their work financed and fed resistance movements and agents in occupied Europe, including Violette Szabo, the agent whose exploits were documented in the war film Carve Her Name With Pride.
A new book about Briggens House, shows how the forgers were engaged in a race against the clock.
“A genuine original document would be smuggled out of France, possibly transported by a Lysander aircraft, submarine or a fast motor torpedo boat,” the late Captain Morton Bisset told Des Turner, author of Briggens: SOE’S Forgery and Polish Agent Training Station.
“Then it would be delivered to us as quickly as possible. We had to copy it and produce the forgery and return the original in a similar manner and just as quickly.”
The team produced a French ration card the same day that the genuine article came out.
At first the team at Briggens was made up of just Jerzy Maciejewski and two other Polish resistance fighters. But they were soon joined by Capt Bisset, a Scottish printer who recruited some fellow tradesmen for the task of using the same fonts, inks and paper as the Germans, or at least those that could fool the eyes of officials.
Before long, Briggens boasted a staff of 50, including draughtsmen, technicians, a Scotland Yard handwriting expert and women from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.
Bisset told Mr Turner: “We went to infinite pains to ensure that they were as authentic as possible, as we knew our agents’ lives might depend upon them.”
Newly discovered documents produced at Briggens show exit visas to Spain and Portugal, fiscal stamps from Germany and Hungary, and identity cards from Poland and France.
One Nazi report on Station XIV found that “the forged ration cards are such deceitfully good copies that single coupons cut from them cannot be recognised immediately as forgeries”.
So authentic was its work that Sergeant Major Arthur Gatward, a handwriting expert, once saved a ship carrying SOE agents, after one of his forged signatures fooled a close friend of the Nazi he was imitating.
To show off their skills the Briggens team mocked up a passport of Adolf Hitler, listing his occupation as painter and recording a “little moustache” as a distinguishing feature.
But they carried out their work with deadly seriousness, many taking their wartime secrets to the grave, hiding them from even their own families.
One forger, Dennis Collins, left a solitary clue to what he had done in the war: a newspaper report in 1949 detailing the existence of SOE, with passages highlighting his work, including forged documents created for Szabo, who was eventually captured by an SS unit at Salon-la-tour and executed, aged 23, at Ravensbruck concentration camp, in February 1945.
Fittingly Briggens, at the time home of the 4th Baron Aldenham, Chairman of Westminster Bank, also produced counterfeit currency to fund resistance cells.
Mr Turner said: “Hitler made so many mistakes because of our misinformation that it won the war. If we hadn’t have done that, we’d have lost it.”