The Guardian 18 June, 2008
Film Review by Peter Mac
The Counterfeiters
Soon after the Berlin Wall fell, neo-Nazis vandalised the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp museum in the former East Germany. During World War II the camp had housed Jewish prisoners who were selected to forge allied currency, passports and other documents. The other inmates worked at the Heinkel aeroplane works and other local industries.
Concentration camp inmates were used as industrial slave labour. Sachenhausen probably became a target because during post war guided tours of Sachsenhausen the companies involved were always named.
The Sachsenhausen counterfeiters
The Austrian film Die Falscher (The Counterfeiters) relates part of the Sachsenhausen story via Salomon Sorowitsch, a character based largely on Salomon Smolianoff, a Russian Jew, artist and master forger.
In the film Sorowitsch, wealthy and cynical, is arrested in 1936 for forging passports and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. He works chained in hideous conditions until, with great cunning, he produces a drawing of a heroically-posed Nazi soldier.
The camp authorities are impressed. He becomes the camp artist, painting flattering portraits of the officers, and survives for years while many of his fellow inmates die, but eventually finds himself destined for Sachsenhausen.
He shares a cattle carriage with a young Slovakian Jew, Adolph Burger. A typographer, forger, and committed communist, Burger only survived a period at Auschwitz because he got the relatively safe job of storing luggage.
On arrival, the prisoners are taken to an enclosed compound where, to their astonishment, they are treated with relative courtesy. The Nazis need a steady and healthy workforce to carry out Operation Bernhard, the production and distribution of enough forged pound notes to wreck the British economy.
The Operation Bernhard prisoners have better clothes, food and accommodation than the others. They’re still subjected to occasional beatings or gross humiliation, but beyond the surrounding heavy fences they can hear the terrible sounds of the other inmates being forced to march ceaselessly around the parade ground, carrying sacks of sand while breaking in undersized army boots.
After prolonged failures, the counterfeiters finally produce forged notes good enough to fool Swiss bank experts, and millions are produced. However, the plan to drop them over Britain is changed, because the Nazis need forged currency, particularly US dollars, for foreign exchange, to purchase vital supplies.
In a moral dilemma, Sorowitsch, by now head forger, finds himself at odds with Burger, who proposes to sabotage production of the dollar notes, thus preventing the Nazis from gaining the supplies.
Unfortunately, this would also result in execution of the counterfeiters. Sorowitsch opposes the plan because, despite his apparent cynicism, he is determined to save all the workers, including Burger himself.
Burger manages to stall production of the greenbacks for a considerable period, while Sorowitsch resorts to desperate and implausible excuses about faulty gelatine. The camp commandant issues an ultimatum: produce credible dollars or die.
Working in secret, Sorowitsch manages to carry out Burger’s work in the production process, and at last produces two rolls of bills. However, the war is ending. Soon afterwards the counterfeiters are released by the other survivors of the camp.
History even stranger than fiction
As the film relates, Operation Bernhardt produced the forged equivalent of some 130 million pounds, which was then about four times the amount of British currency reserves. Because the US entered the war late and because of delays in production, the quantity of forged dollars produced was relatively small. The Nazis managed to use much of the forged currency and dumped some of the remaining notes in Lake Toplitz. They were recovered in 2000.
The Nazis actually got the idea for the forged currency after British aircraft dropped forged Nazi certificates of payment over Germany 1939. The British government was warned about a plan to forge sterling currency in the same year, although the Nazis were initially reluctant to proceed because of a possible backlash from their creditors.
The forging operation was formally known simply as "Aktion 1". It later became known as "Operation Andrew" or "Operation Andreas". "Operation Bernhard" was actually the name given by a few high-ranking officers to their own plan to skim off many of the forgeries for their own benefit! An estimated one third of the notes disappeared in this way.
Top quality forgeries were only produced after Smolianoff arrived at Sachsenhausen. The first forged sterling note was identified in 1943, when a bank clerk in Tangiers noticed that two notes in her hands had the same serial number. Later described as the best forgeries in history, the notes were individually checked for quality by the counterfeiters, and excessively handled to appear worn. They were very difficult to detect, and British banking officials considered them extremely dangerous.
The distributed currency caused the Bank of England enormous losses, and for a long period after the war Britain withdrew all ten, twenty and fifty pound notes from circulation.
Burger, the only character in the film not "blended" from more than one real individual, was sent to Mauthausen in 1944. The forging operation was transferred to southern Germany and continued until May 1945. The remaining prisoners were then transferred to the Ebensee camp. Transport difficulties and a prisoner rebellion forestalled their planned execution, and Ebensee was finally liberated by US forces.
The film tells relatively little about the other Sachsenhausen inmates. Terribly emaciated, many of them died in the excruciating forced marches; others were shot, garrotted or beaten to death. Two of the inmates escaped in an aircraft they seized at the Heinkel airstrip, but it later crashed and both were killed.
The film fails to point out that few of Sachsenhausen’s buildings actually survived the war, because allied aircraft bombed the camp. It’s not clear how many prisoners died in those raids, nor whether the allies knew the extraordinary significance of the camp. However, if the attacks were part of a deliberate plan to wreck the forging operation, it would be quite consistent with other allied operations, for example the raids on the Peenamunde rocket sites, which caused severe damage but killed many prisoners.
Setting things straight
Although the film is centred on Sorowisch, Burger frequently steals the show. And so he should! Not only is he still very much alive, but the film is actually based on his memoirs, The Devil’s Workshop. At 91 years of age he was extensively consulted with regard to the film’s production.
The film depicts concentration camp life realistically, counteracting post-war denials of the Holocaust, such as those of rabidly right-wing British historian Robert Irving.
It also sets the record straight about Sachsenhausen. This is particularly important because of the impression of life in the camp created in Private Schulz, the horribly insensitive and grossly inaccurate 1980 BBC TV comedy about the counterfeiters.
The Sachsenhausen forging operation inspired themes in the films Five Fingers and The Odessa File, and in the novel Exodus. August Diehl as Burger, and Karl Markovics as the poker-faced Sorowitsch are terrific in director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s grim but fascinating film The Counterfeiters, which deservedly won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film. It’s well worth seeing.
Many thanks to K.R.Green for internet research
Reference: Nazi Gold, spiritone.com/~gdy52150/goldp5.html.
Peter Mac was a visitor to Sachsenhausen in 1975.