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Spanish Priests in Paris in WWII Saved Jews with Forged Baptism Certificates
(Jerusalem Post) Rossella Tercatin - Between 1940 and 1944, four Spanish Claretian priests based in Paris forged baptismal and wedding certificates for 155 Jews to protect them from persecution, Spanish historian Santiago Lopez Rodriguez has discovered. 138 of those who received the documents managed to survive the Holocaust. While researching his doctoral thesis on the work of Spanish diplomacy during the Holocaust, he found that in the period when France was ruled by Nazi-collaborator Philippe Petain, four clerics in a Spanish church in Paris seemingly converted to Catholicism the members of dozens of Jewish families, mostly from Istanbul and Thessaloniki. "Entire families were converted on the same day and in some cases the marriage certificate was also forged at the same time," he said.