Operation Bernhard
Encyclopedia
Operation Bernhard was the codename of a secret Nazi
plan devised during the Second World War by the RSHA
and the SS to destabilise the British
economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England
£5, £10, £20, and £50 notes. It is the largest counterfeit
ing operation in history and has been fictionalised in books, the BBC comedy-drama miniseries Private Schulz
and a 2007 Oscar
-winning Austrian film
, The Counterfeiters
(Die Fälscher).
Sturmbannführer
(SS
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 almost impossible to distinguish from the real currency.
The initial plan was to destabilize the British economy by dropping the notes from aircraft, on the assumption that most Britons would collect the money they found floating from the sky and spend it into their economy, thus triggering inflation. This scheme was not put into effect: it was postulated that the Luftwaffe did not have enough planes to effectively 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 Meran in South Tyrol
, Northern Italy
, from where they were laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and German secret agents operating in the Allied countries. It is alleged 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. As late as the 1940s every banknote issued by the Bank of England 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 Head Office (RSHA
) 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 order was that all the counterfeiters be liquidated together; the delayed arrival of the third batch therefore saved the lives of all of them.
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 Europe
an languages and in Persian
. An English version was published in 2009 as The Devil's Workshop.
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.
After the defeat of the Third Reich, large bundles of fake pounds ended up in the hands of the Jewish underground, which used the forged notes to buy equipment and to bring displaced persons to the Holy Land, among them Chaim Shurik, a Polish printer whose 20-page account of his counterfeiting days was written in Hebrew. The Jewish underground likely had access to forged U.S. dollars as well, but apparently avoided using them so as not to damage relations with the United States.
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. A new £5 banknote colored blue was issued on 21 February 1957, and the other denominations were reintroduced on February 21 1964 (£10), July 9 1970 (£20) and March 20 1981 (£50).
German spy Elyesa Bazna
(codename "Cicero") was paid with counterfeit notes, and unsuccessfully sued the German government after the war for outstanding pay.
A fictionalized version of the Operation Bernhard story was the topic of a comedy drama serial, Private Schulz
, starring Michael Elphick
and Ian Richardson
, produced by the BBC in 1980.
It also forms part of the backstory for the forger in the 1972 Frederick Forsyth
novel, The Odessa File
.
The 2007 Oscar-winning Austrian film, The Counterfeiters
(Die Fälscher), tells the story of Salomon Sorowitsch, loosely based on the lives of counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff
, and of Adolf Burger, a Jewish
Slovak
book printer who was put to work on Operation Bernhard in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and whose memoirs were turned into the screenplay.
In the movie 5 Fingers
, based upon the life of the German spy Cicero
, the final plot turn is the revelation that the British currency is counterfeit.
In the British comedy series "Goodnight Sweetheart
" starring Nicholas Lyndhurst
, the episode entitled "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie". Operation Bernhard was used as a way for the main characters to catch a Nazi spy who was passing off forged notes in local pubs and shops in London.
The 1941-published novel Traitor's Purse
(US title The Sabotage Murder Mystery) by Margery Allingham
featured (presumably by coincidence) a very similar plot wherein, to lend them verisimilitude, the forged notes were to be posted to every household in Britain in parallel with a secretly-planned genuine Government mailing.
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
plan devised during the Second World War by the RSHA
RSHA
The RSHA, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt was an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacities as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS...
and the SS to destabilise the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England
Bank of England
The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694, it is the second oldest central bank in the world...
£5, £10, £20, and £50 notes. It is the largest counterfeit
Counterfeit
To counterfeit means to illegally imitate something. Counterfeit products are often produced with the intent to take advantage of the superior value of the imitated product...
ing operation in history and has been fictionalised in books, the BBC comedy-drama miniseries Private Schulz
Private Schulz (TV series)
Private Schulz was a BBC television comedy drama mini-series starring Michael Elphick in the title role and Ian Richardson playing various parts...
and a 2007 Oscar
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...
-winning Austrian film
Cinema of Austria
Austria has had an active cinema industry since the early 20th century. Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky was among the Austrian pioneers of this art. Several Austrians pursued a career in pre-Nazi Germany and later in the United States, among them Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Fred...
, The Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters (film)
The Counterfeiters is a 2007 Austrian-German film written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the Nazis during the Second World War to destabilize Great Britain by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England bank notes.The film centres on a...
(Die Fälscher).
History
The plan was directed by, and named after, SchutzstaffelSchutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
Sturmbannführer
Sturmbannführer
Sturmbannführer was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party equivalent to major, used both in the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel...
(SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
Major
Major
Major is a rank of commissioned officer, with corresponding ranks existing in almost every military in the world.When used unhyphenated, in conjunction with no other indicator of rank, the term refers to the rank just senior to that of an Army captain and just below the rank of lieutenant colonel. ...
) Bernhard Krüger
Bernhard Krüger
Bernhard Krüger was a Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer during World War II, the leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA....
, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used primarily for political prisoners from 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in May, 1945. After World War II, when Oranienburg was in the Soviet Occupation Zone, the structure was used as an NKVD...
at first, and then from other camps, especially Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
. 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 almost impossible to distinguish from the real currency.
South Tyrol
South Tyrol , also known by its Italian name Alto Adige, is an autonomous province in northern Italy. It is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants...
, Northern Italy
Northern Italy
Northern Italy is a wide cultural, historical and geographical definition, without any administrative usage, used to indicate the northern part of the Italian state, also referred as Settentrione or Alta Italia...
, from where they were laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and German secret agents operating in the Allied countries. It is alleged that counterfeit currency was used to finance the rescue of the arrested former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
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. As late as the 1940s every banknote issued by the Bank of England 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
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
, 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 Head Office (RSHA
RSHA
The RSHA, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt was an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacities as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS...
) ordered the work halted and the press dismantled.
On the evacuation of Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiting team was transferred to Redl-Zipf in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
, a subsidiary camp of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp
Mauthausen Concentration Camp grew to become a large group of Nazi concentration camps that was built around the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria, roughly east of the city of Linz.Initially a single camp at Mauthausen, it expanded over time and by the summer of 1940, the...
. At the beginning of May 1945, the team was ordered to transfer to Ebensee subsidiary camp
Ebensee concentration camp
The Ebensee concentration camp was established by the SS to build tunnels for armaments storage near the town of Ebensee, Austria in 1943. It was part of the Mauthausen network....
, 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 order was that all the counterfeiters be liquidated together; the delayed arrival of the third batch therefore saved the lives of all of them.
The Ebensee camp was liberated by US forces on 6 May 1945. One of the prisoners, the Jewish
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
Slovak
Slovakia
The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...
printer-turned-counterfeiter Adolf Burger
Adolf Burger
Adolf Burger Adolf Burger Adolf Burger (born August 12, 1917, Kakaslomnic (aka Nagy-Lomnicz, , , Comitate of Szepes, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire) is a Jewish Slovak typographer, memoir writer, and Holocaust survivor involved in Operation Bernhard...
, later contributed to the awareness of Operation Bernhard with several versions of his memoirs published in Central Europe
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
an languages and in Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
. An English version was published in 2009 as The Devil's Workshop.
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.
After the defeat of the Third Reich, large bundles of fake pounds ended up in the hands of the Jewish underground, which used the forged notes to buy equipment and to bring displaced persons to the Holy Land, among them Chaim Shurik, a Polish printer whose 20-page account of his counterfeiting days was written in Hebrew. The Jewish underground likely had access to forged U.S. dollars as well, but apparently avoided using them so as not to damage relations with the United States.
It is believed that most of the notes produced ended up at the bottom of Lake Toplitz
Lake Toplitz
Lake Toplitz is a lake situated in a dense mountain forest high up in the Austrian Alps, from Salzburg in western Austria. It is surrounded by cliffs and forests in the Salzkammergut lake district, within the Totes Gebirge . The Toplitzsee water contains no oxygen below a depth of 20m...
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. A new £5 banknote colored blue was issued on 21 February 1957, and the other denominations were reintroduced on February 21 1964 (£10), July 9 1970 (£20) and March 20 1981 (£50).
German spy Elyesa Bazna
Elyesa Bazna
Elyesa Bazna was a famous World War II secret agent. An Albanian from Kosovo who spied for the Germans during the Second World War, and was widely known by his code name Cicero...
(codename "Cicero") was paid with counterfeit notes, and unsuccessfully sued the German government after the war for outstanding pay.
In fiction
Private Schulz (TV series)
Private Schulz was a BBC television comedy drama mini-series starring Michael Elphick in the title role and Ian Richardson playing various parts...
, starring Michael Elphick
Michael Elphick
Michael John Elphick was an English actor. Elphick was known in the UK for his trademark croaky voice and his work on British television, in particular his roles as the eponymous private investigator in the ITV series Boon and later Harry Slater in BBC's EastEnders.Robust and ruggedly good-looking...
and Ian Richardson
Ian Richardson
Ian William Richardson CBE was a Scottish actor best known for his portrayal of the Machiavellian Tory politician Francis Urquhart in the BBC's House of Cards trilogy. He was also a leading Shakespearean stage actor....
, produced by the BBC in 1980.
It also forms part of the backstory for the forger in the 1972 Frederick Forsyth
Frederick Forsyth
Frederick Forsyth, CBE is an English author and occasional political commentator. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan and The Cobra.-...
novel, The Odessa File
The Odessa File
The Odessa File is a thriller by Frederick Forsyth, first published in 1972, about the adventures of a young German reporter attempting to discover the location of a former SS concentration-camp commander....
.
The 2007 Oscar-winning Austrian film, The Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters (film)
The Counterfeiters is a 2007 Austrian-German film written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the Nazis during the Second World War to destabilize Great Britain by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England bank notes.The film centres on a...
(Die Fälscher), tells the story of Salomon Sorowitsch, loosely based on the lives of counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff
Salomon Smolianoff
Salomon Smolianoff was a Russian counterfeiter and Holocaust survivor involved in Operation Bernhard. In the film The Counterfeiters based on Adolf Burger's memoirs received a foreign-language Oscar for Austria in 2008, the character is renamed Salomon "Salli" Sorowitsch...
, and of Adolf Burger, a Jewish
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
Slovak
Slovakia
The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...
book printer who was put to work on Operation Bernhard in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and whose memoirs were turned into the screenplay.
In the movie 5 Fingers
5 Fingers
5 Fingers, known also as Five Fingers, is a 1952 American 20th Century Fox spy film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and produced by Otto Lang. The screenplay by Michael Wilson and Mankiewicz was based on Operation Cicero by L.C...
, based upon the life of the German spy Cicero
Elyesa Bazna
Elyesa Bazna was a famous World War II secret agent. An Albanian from Kosovo who spied for the Germans during the Second World War, and was widely known by his code name Cicero...
, the final plot turn is the revelation that the British currency is counterfeit.
In the British comedy series "Goodnight Sweetheart
Goodnight Sweetheart
Goodnight Sweetheart is a sitcom that ran for six series on BBC1 from 1993 to 1999. It stars Nicholas Lyndhurst as Gary Sparrow, an accidental time traveller who leads a double life after discovering a time portal allowing him to travel between the London of the 1990s and the same area during the...
" starring Nicholas Lyndhurst
Nicholas Lyndhurst
Nicholas Simon Lyndhurst is an English actor. He is best known for his roles as Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses, Gary Sparrow in Goodnight Sweetheart, and as Adam Parkinson in Carla Lane's series Butterflies...
, the episode entitled "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie". Operation Bernhard was used as a way for the main characters to catch a Nazi spy who was passing off forged notes in local pubs and shops in London.
The 1941-published novel Traitor's Purse
Traitor's Purse
Traitor's Purse is a crime novel written by Margery Allingham. It was originally published in 1941 in the United Kingdom by Heinemann, London and in the United States by Doubleday, New York as The Sabotage Murder Mystery...
(US title The Sabotage Murder Mystery) by Margery Allingham
Margery Allingham
Margery Louise Allingham was an English crime writer, best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.- Childhood and schooling :...
featured (presumably by coincidence) a very similar plot wherein, to lend them verisimilitude, the forged notes were to be posted to every household in Britain in parallel with a secretly-planned genuine Government mailing.
See also
- SuperdollarSuperdollarA superdollar or superbill is a very high quality counterfeit United States one hundred-dollar bill, alleged by the U.S. Government to have been made by an unknown organization or government. Various groups have been suspected of creating such notes, and international opinion on the origin of the...
s, high-quality counterfeit dollars suspected to come from a foreign power - The Adventures of Tintin: The Black IslandThe Black IslandThe Black Island is the seventh of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as the hero. It was first published in the newspaper supplement Le Petit Vingtième in the late 1930s...
Further reading
- Burger, Adolf. The Devils Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation. 2009. Frontline Books. ISBN 978-1848325234
- Burke, Bryan. Nazi Counterfeiting of British Currency during World War II: Operation Andrew and Operation Bernhard (1987) ISBN 0-9618274-0-8 (Limited edition of 1000)
- Delgado, Arturo R. Counterfeit Reich: Hitler's Secret Swindle (2006) ISBN 978-1424103898
- Malkin,Lawrence. Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19 (2006) ISBN 0-316-05700-2 ISBN 978-0-316005700-4
- Malkin, Lawrence. Hitlers Geldfälscher: Wie die Nazis planten, das internationale Währungssystem auszuhebeln (2006) ISBN 978-3-7857-3349-7 (ab 1.2. 2007)
- Nachtstern, Moritz & Arntzen, Ragnar. Falksmyntner i Sachsenhausen: Hvordan en norsk jøde overlevde holocaust (1949) ISBN 978-82-430-0404-7
- Pirie, Anthony. Operation Bernhard. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1962. No ISBN; Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number 62-11353.
External links
- Lawrence Malkin's website - Author of "Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19"
- The Great Nazi Cash Swindle - webchat with director/producer of a Channel 4Channel 4Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
documentary on Operation Bernhard.