The Counterfeiters

Watched this tonight on Sky.

In 1936, the Nazis used concentration camp prisoners to set up a massive counterfeiting scam designed to undermine the Allies economies.

Based on a true story that I believe the Germans called Operation Bernhard

Well worth a watch if you get a chance to see it

 

From what I recall, it wasn't very successful.

There's a parallel today. Countries who use hackers to undermine another country. And with the extraordinary dependence on computers, I would have thought they would be very successful.

 

The forgeries of the British pound notes were excellent but not perfect.
Here's one from my collection:


And this is Major Bernard Kruger:


I found the movie entertaining but would have liked more details of the forgery operation, whereas the movie revolves around the characters. It is not entirely accurate either. There was no sabotage of the forgery operations at Sachsenhausen and there's still debate about how far the forging of US dollars actually progressed.

Personally I prefer the BBC comedy series Private Schultz with the late, great Michael Elphick.

One upshot of the forgery operations was that post-war all large sterling banknotes were withdrawn from circulation. I believe the £50 note was not re-introduced until the 1980's, if I remember correctly.

The Sachsenhausen inmates also faked British postage stamps for propaganda purposes.


Note: the accidental misspelling of the word Jewish.

 

Judging by the number of fake US and EU notes in circulation, I'd say the counterfeiting was alive and well.

I wouldn't have thought too many fake Aussie notes were doing the rounds however. Being made of plastic must be inhibiting.

 

The film won an Oscar so it wasn't that unsuccesful. However it is an Austrian Film with subtitles (Which would steer many people away) and like the previous WW2 film to come from the country about the final days of Hitler in Berlin I thought it was very good.

According to Wikipedia it seemed quite a successful operation. It sounds as though like all too many German ventures it was too little too late, thankfully.

The real plan was directed by, and named after, SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Bernhard Krüger, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp at first, and then from other camps, especially Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, the work of engraving the complex printing plates, developing the appropriate rag-based paper with the correct watermarks, and breaking the code to generate valid serial numbers was extremely difficult, but by the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being extremely difficult to distinguish from the real currency.

A counterfeit £5 note forged by the Jewish Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp prisoners


The initial plan was to destabilise the British economy by dropping the notes from aircraft, on the assumption that while some people would hand them in most people would keep the notes, but it was not put into effect. The Luftwaffe did not have enough planes to deliver the forgeries, and by that time the operation was in the hands of SS foreign intelligence. From late 1943 approximately one million notes per month were printed. Many were transferred from SS headquarters to a former hotel near Merano in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, Northern Italy, from where they were laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and to pay German agents. It has been reported that counterfeit currency was used to finance the rescue of the arrested former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943, but there is no evidence to confirm this.
The Bank of England first learned of a plot from a spy as early as 1939. It detected the existence of the notes in 1943, and declared them "the most dangerous ever seen." Clerks first recorded the counterfeits from a British bank in Tangiers. Every banknote issued by the Bank of England as late as the 1940s was recorded in large leather-bound ledgers, still in the Bank's archives, and it was noted that one of the notes had been recorded as having been paid off. The counterfeiting team turned its attention to US currency, producing samples of one side of $100 bills on 22 February 1945 with full production scheduled to start the next day, but the Reich Security Main Office ordered the work halted and the press dismantled.
On the evacuation of Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiting team was transferred to Redl-Zipf in Austria, a subsidiary camp of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At the beginning of May 1945 the team was ordered to transfer to Ebensee subsidiary camp, where they were to be killed together. Their SS guards had only one truck for the prisoners, so the transfer required three round trips. The truck broke down during the third trip, and the last batch of prisoners had to be marched to Ebensee, where they arrived on 4 May. The guards of the first two batches of prisoners fled when the prisoners at the Ebensee camp revolted and refused to be moved into tunnels, where they would have probably been blown up. The counterfeiters then dispersed among the prisoners at Ebensee. The delayed arrival of the third batch therefore saved the lives of all - as a result of the order that all the counterfeiters be liquidated together, none was killed.
The Ebensee camp was liberated by US forces on 6 May 1945. One of the prisoners, the Jewish Slovak printer-turned-counterfeiter Adolf Burger, later contributed to the awareness of Operation Bernhard with several versions of his memoirs published in Central European languages and in Persian.
After the war, Major Krüger was detained by the British for two years, then turned over to the French for a year. He said they asked him to forge documents but that he refused. He was released in 1948 without any charges being pressed. In the 1950s he went before a De-Nazification Court, where statements were produced from the forger-inmates whose lives he had been responsible for saving. He later worked for the company that had produced the special paper for the Operation Bernhard forgeries. He died in 1989.
It is believed that most of the notes produced ended up at the bottom of Lake Toplitz near Ebensee, from where they were recovered by divers in 1959, but examples continued to turn up in circulation in Britain for many years, which caused the Bank of England to withdraw all notes larger than £5 from circulation, and not reintroduce other denominations until the early 1960s (£10), 1970 (£20) and 1980 (£50).
German spy Elyesa Bazna (codename "Cicero") was paid with counterfeit notes, and unsuccessfully sued the German government after the war for outstanding pay.

 

I think the main thrust of the exercise was to flood the British economy with false £5 notes....some might remember the note,a large white type.

Operation Bernhard was devised by Naujocks, an assistant to Heydrich serving in the SD.He had a CV of managing a section of the SD which dealt in a specialisation of forging passports and accessories for espionage agents.

Naujocks,described by Shirer as "a sort of intellectual gangster" was behind a number of military intelligence deceptions ...the man who staged the "Polish" attack on the German / Polish frontier wireless transmission station at Gleiwitz which "incensed" Hitler so much that he invaded Poland.Another of his escapades was the involvement in the duping of British military intelligence which resulted in the kidnapping of the British agents, Payne Best and Stevens on the German/Dutch border at Venlo.....The Venlo Incident

When Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg against the west in May 1940,Naujocks was behind the operation for German troops to disguise themselves as Dutch and Belgium frontier guards.Alfred Helmut Naujocks.....the man who liked to be known as "the man who started World War 2" by his actions at Gleiwitz.

Getting back to the £5 large white note. Remember doing a job just after leaving school waiting to start my real job.I received a £5 note for a weeks work handling potatoes that had been lifted by hand after being spun out by the spinner.....bumper crop at 15 tons/acre if I recollect ... within spitting distance of the former RAF Burn....indeed one of the farm's employees was a former RCAF servicemen who had stayed behind after marrying locally.

 

Harry did he forge his CV too

Hopefully they were careful to check there

Here's what the old lady of threadneedle street currently has to say about such nefarious deeds:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Pages/reproducing_banknotes.aspx

The Bank of England also owns the copyright in its banknotes. (Which means you can't post what one un-counterfeited actually looked like)

But they seem to like to give the impression (I think) that all you have to do is fill out a form....

Procedure
Those wishing to reproduce Bank of England banknotes should, before taking steps to reproduce such notes, apply for consent on-line by completing and submitting the Banknote reproductions application form, which contains explanation and guidance notes. The Note Reproductions Officer will endeavour to respond within five working days of receipt. Postal applications can also be made by printing and completing the application form below and mailing it to the correspondence address given below. The Note Reproductions Officer will endeavour to respond within 5 working days of receipt.
Once you have let them know what you are about...they'll get back to you no doubt

(I guess the wheels of justice are slow...but somehow I don't think the above quite covers what the Germans did!)

Criminality during a time of war?! What will the Nazi's think of next!

 

One of the posters on my childhood bedroom was a large facsimile of a Bank of England £5 note. Not long after buying it, my Mum read in the paper that the Bank of England had forced the company that made the posters to cease production. Although much bigger than a fiver and printed on only one side, they were technically forgeries.

 

Thanks Diane for posting the fiver.I could not pick up the image and comment on it when I posted #7 as I have a "connection reset" problem and it is preventing the presentation of some images.....working on resolving

The white fiver was a little crisp to hold and felt it was real money.....a pleasure to handle.