The need for life-saving documents arose in 1942, when Jewish refugees began arriving from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Various documents such as birth certificates and identity papers were forged in Budapest in a variety of ways. The youth movements perfected the production and distribution of the fabricated documents to their members, and when the Germans took over Hungary in on March 19, 1944, the workshop for creating documents for the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movement (ZYRM) was ready for operations. The workshop was upgraded to a real production plant that could provide forged documents of almost any kind, for anyone who needed them. These documents facilitated the “Aryanization” of the ZYRM operatives and enabled them to carry out their missions.
During 1944 the production of the forged documents increased, and with it the risk to the workshop and its operators, as described on the page “The need for documents and the workshop that was set up.”
