Plan to bring down Britain from inside a concentration camp (movie)
It is believed to be the biggest counterfeiting operation of all time - a spectacular attempt to crush the British economy by flooding it with huge quantities of sterling and US dollar notes.
Now the inside story of Operation Bernhard, in which 142 concentration camp prisoners were put to work for the last three years of the second world war to create millions of false British and American banknotes, has been dramatised for the cinema for the first time.
The Counterfeiters has its premiere at the Berlin film festival tonight and tells the little-known story of the men and women forced to participate in the operation from the squalor of their prison.
Based on the book The Devil's Workshop, a first-hand description by printer Adolf Burger, now 90 years old, of his experience as one of the counterfeiters, the film homes in on the so-called gilded cage in which prisoners, ranging from printers and setters to bank clerks and nimble-fingered hairdressers, were kept.
Unlike their fellow inmates they were fed well, given sufficient bedding, coffee and cigarettes, and allowed to play table tennis to keep up their morale.
Parts of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, in which Operation Bernhard was carried out, was recreated for the making of the film, a £2.8m German-Austrian coproduction directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
The film is the latest in a series of Third Reich films to come out of Germany, including Mein Führer, a comedy about a bedwetting Adolf Hitler, the German-Jewish comedy Go for Zucker! and the 2004 production, The Downfall, on Hitler's final days in the bunker.
Read entire article at Guardian
Now the inside story of Operation Bernhard, in which 142 concentration camp prisoners were put to work for the last three years of the second world war to create millions of false British and American banknotes, has been dramatised for the cinema for the first time.
The Counterfeiters has its premiere at the Berlin film festival tonight and tells the little-known story of the men and women forced to participate in the operation from the squalor of their prison.
Based on the book The Devil's Workshop, a first-hand description by printer Adolf Burger, now 90 years old, of his experience as one of the counterfeiters, the film homes in on the so-called gilded cage in which prisoners, ranging from printers and setters to bank clerks and nimble-fingered hairdressers, were kept.
Unlike their fellow inmates they were fed well, given sufficient bedding, coffee and cigarettes, and allowed to play table tennis to keep up their morale.
Parts of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, in which Operation Bernhard was carried out, was recreated for the making of the film, a £2.8m German-Austrian coproduction directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
The film is the latest in a series of Third Reich films to come out of Germany, including Mein Führer, a comedy about a bedwetting Adolf Hitler, the German-Jewish comedy Go for Zucker! and the 2004 production, The Downfall, on Hitler's final days in the bunker.