‘The Counterfeiters’

Left: Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch Right: Dolores Chaplin as Die Rothaarige

Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch

Left to Right: August Diehl as Adolf Burger, Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch, Veit Stübner as Atze and August Zirner as Dr. Klinger

Left to Right: Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch, Devid Striesow as Friedrich Herzog and Martin Brambach as Holst

Left: Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch Right: Marie Bäumer as Aglaya

Devid Striesow as Friedrich Herzog and Family

Left: Dolores Chaplin as Die Rothaarige Right: Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch

Left: Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch Right: Devid Striesow as Friedrich Herzog

Director Stefan Ruzowitzky

Adolf Burger with the counterfeit money.

Adolf Burger

Adolf Burger

An example of the counterfeit currency produced by Operation Bernhard.

An example of the counterfeit Lira made by Operation Bernhard

An example of the counterfeit Lira made by Operation Bernhard

One of the printing machines used by Operation Bernhard

One of the printing machines used by Operation Bernhard

An example of the counterfeit currency made by Operation Bernard

An example of the counterfeit currency made by Operation Bernard

From Sony Classics: "The Counterfeiters is the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch is the king of counterfeiters. He lives a mischievous life of cards, booze, and women in Berlin during the Nazi-era. Suddenly his luck runs dry when arrested by Superintendent Friedrich Herzog. Immediately thrown into the Mauthausen concentration camp, Salomon exhibits exceptional skills there and is soon transferred to the upgraded camp of Sachsenhausen. Upon his arrival, he once again comes face to face with Herzog, who is there on a secret mission. Hand-picked for his unique skill, Salomon and a group of professionals are forced to produce fake foreign currency under the program Operation Bernhard. The team, which also includes detainee Adolf Burger, is given luxury barracks for their assistance. But while Salomon attempts to weaken the economy of Germany’s allied opponents, Adolf refuses to use his skills for Nazi profit and would like to do something to stop Operation Bernhard’s aid to the war effort. Faced with a moral dilemma, Salomon must decide whether his actions, which could prolong the war and risk the lives of fellow prisoners, are ultimately the right ones."

From the director:

I never thought I’d dare make a concentration camp movie.
So why make one now?
Nowadays you no longer have to disseminate the basic facts about concentration
camps. Since Life is Beautiful one can, may and indeed must narrate individual fates
which don‘t claim to represent all victims. One can tell universal stories and limit
oneself to small but relevant fragments of the overall truth.
Our hero Spiranoff closes his eyes to what is happening. So do we as the viewers
joining him: we have to see only in very small details what could not be shown
anyway. But we do have to listen with him to the horror behind the fence. This can
generate a much larger and thus more authentic sense of horror in the head of the
viewer.
What’s particularly interesting is the grotesquely privileged situation of our characters:
this allows us to approach this horror by virtue of its absence. We learn what an
unimaginable luxury it is not to be beaten or to eat one’s watery soup in peace and
quiet; we see grown men weeping because they have a name and purposeful
occupation again – all this builds up to form a picture of the kind of hell they have
come from.
THE COUNTERFEITERS allows one to look into one of the most interesting aspects
of the concentration camp phenomenon: the moral plight of the prisoners. They were
often forced to steal from their fellow-inmates in order to avoid starvation – the worst
aspects of human nature were brought out in them, contrary to idealizing notions of
self-sacrifice. These people had to adapt to an inhumane system with all the
consequences in order to survive. Right down to what is known as "survivor’s guilt",
the question: Why was I allowed to survive, while so many others had to die?
Being the grandchild of grandparents who were – some more some less – attached
to the Nazi-party and living in a country that still has big problems dealing with its
Nazi past, I always felt that I have to comment on this issue as a filmmaker.
When I heard about the counterfeiters for the first time I knew right away that this
might be the perfect topic for me.
These days people in Germany and Austria are succumbing to a prurient fascination
with evil and its villainous protagonists. They’re also discovering their role as
"victims".
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My greatest concern was to avoid making a clumsy and politically correct film about
coming to terms with history which would become compulsory viewing for school
history lessons.
I aimed for immediacy, avoiding the slickness that characterizes mainstream
entertainment cinema: every shot perfectly lit, every emotion emphasized by the
score. I wanted to underscore the timelessness of the subject, pointing its relevance
for a contemporary audience. I tried to get the liveliness of a "documentary" camera
style with a very mobile camera that gave the actors a lot of freedom. We wanted the
camera to always stay close to their faces to allow us to feel we’re there with them
instead of being a distant observer.
In the movie one character says: “I never would be in the position of a Nazi!“
This was the only rule my DP, Benedict Neuenfels, and I set up: the camera must
never show the Nazi’s P.O.V., always over shoulder of the inmates, never over
shoulder of a Nazi.
We tried very hard to avoid the cliché of "typical“ Jews. In the first draft of the
screenplay all the Jewish concentration camp inmates were sensitive intellectuals
with melancholy features. But more intensive study of the sources made me realize
I’d fallen for a cliché. The real counterfeiters were manual laborers from the suburbs
with the typically blunt Berlin dialect, over-correct Prussian bank officials, smart
commercial photographers. Well-intentioned positive clichés are dangerous as well:
they strengthen the prejudice that Jews are somehow different, a different race.
Many of the scenes in the counterfeiting workshop are scored – a historically correct
detail – with light operetta music, a wonderful cipher for the absurdity of the situation.
For Spiranoff, my main character, I chose the tango rather than Jewish folk music.
Tango is melancholy but full of life and passion, pain and love; it is both dissonant
and melodious, the music of the underdog and the petty criminal underworld in the
thirties. It was in keeping with our hero, who, before the war, never felt he was part of
the Jewish world.

"Operation Bernhard" in film and reality
A barrack with a ping-pong table, cabaret-like revues and operettas as background
music – the details are too grotesque to have been thought up by a screenwriter.
These are true scenes from the counterfeiters’ workshop at the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp.
THE COUNTERFEITERS relates the story of this workshop and of the "Operation
Bernhard" that gave rise to it. The operation was launched in 1942 and followed a
secret plan devised by the Nazis under the leadership of then counterfeit inspector
Bernhard Krüger. The goal of the operation was to produce fake British pounds and
U.S. dollars in order to weaken the economies of those enemy countries. It was also
believed that the Nazis wanted to carry out major financial transactions such as the
purchase of war material with this money, but this is contested by historians.
The Nazis took the workers for their project from the concentration camps. Jailed
specialists – professional printers, graphic artists, typographists, all of them Jews,
good citizens and honest workers – were brought to Sachsenhausen to put this plan
into effect. Sealed off from the outside world, the prisoners in Blocks 18 and 19 of the
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Sachsenhausen camp were forced to work as counterfeiters for this top-secret Nazi
operation.
Producing counterfeit money was the main activity of the "Golden Cage," as the
inmates called their division, but identification papers and passports were also
produced for the secret service. Altogether 134 million pound sterling were produced
in Sachsenhausen, triple the amount of Britain’s currency reserves. Between 1942
and 1945 there were 140 prisoners busy producing banknotes in denominations of 5,
10, 20 and 50 pounds. The counterfeit bills of "Operation Bernhard" were so perfect
that they could hardly be distinguished from the originals.
Separated from the "regular" prisoners, the inmates of Blocks 18 and 19 had much
better living conditions than those in the rest of Sachsenhausen and even of all the
other concentration camps. They had enough to eat and were each given their own
bed to sleep in, and the Kommandant gave them a ping-pong table and threw parties
every now and then to strengthen their morale. Although they didn’t have to wear
prison clothing, they knew that the clothes they wore came from prisoners who had
been gassed. And the threat of death was always with them if their work was not up
to par, or sabotaged. Most men suspected that their knowledge of this top-secret
operation marked them for death anyway, and that once the operation was
successful they would be eliminated.
Thus they forged money while under constant fear of death, kept devising new
strategies to delay the production and to make as many rejects as possible to gain
time – even though they were aware that they could not sabotage the process
forever without risking their own lives.
As soon as the prisoners succeeded in making the perfect English pound notes, they
were given the order to forge U.S. dollars. To support the "dollar group," counterfeit
inspector Krüger brought in a new prisoner to the shop in 1944, Salomon Smolianoff,
called "Sally," a Russian Jewish artist and the most notorious forger of art and money
in his day. He inspired the lead character in THE COUNTERFEITERS, Salomon
Sorowitsch. Like Sorowitsch, Smolianoff also landed in prison before the outbreak of
the war because he let a beautiful woman keep him one night too many in Berlin.
And just as camp Kommandant Friedrich Herzog arrested Sorowitsch, in real life it
was Krüger who put the "genuine Sorowitsch" behind bars. Smolianoff was sent to
the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1939, and made himself useful to the S.S.
guards as a portraitist and artist. In 1944 he was relocated to the counterfeit
workshop at Sachsenhausen and arrived "with a bit of a belly," as Adolf Burger
remembers.
But the year ended without Smolianoff having produced a usable dollar. The group
managed to delay the difficult printing process for several months. Smolianoff did not
take part in the sabotage actions of the other members of the group; the master
counterfeiter worked hard and demonstrated his skills. But his colleagues wanted to
delay the production as long as possible and deliberately kept ruining the gelatin
needed for the printing. Yet it wasn’t possible to keep this up forever and in the end,
they succeeded in producing the first perfect dollar notes. The counterfeiters,
however, had also achieved their goal: the Allies were on the way, and the Germans
were no longer able to produce large quantities of counterfeit dollars.
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The end of "Operation Bernhard"
In THE COUNTERFEITERS Sorowitsch and his fellow prisoners are freed from
Sachsenhausen. In reality, the counterfeit blocks were dismantled when the eastern
front collapsed in early 1945 and the Russians crossed the Oder on their way to
Berlin. The prisoners and their workshop were moved to the Alps and ultimately
relocated to the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria’s Salzkammergut, where the
prisoners were freed by the U.S. Army. The approach of the Allied forces prevented
the Nazis from finding a safe place to hide the counterfeit money. S.S. men thus
threw many crates with counterfeit British pounds into Lake Toplitz in May 1945.
All traces of the master counterfeiter Smolianoff were lost after his liberation. It is said
that he came to Monte Carlo shortly after the end of the war, and that he lost a great
deal of money at the Casino. He was soon on the international "Wanted" lists as a
counterfeiter, but he is also believed to have forged emigration papers for Jews trying
to go to Palestine. Smolianoff died in Argentina in the 1960s. He allegedly spent his
last years living from the "rediscovery" of Old Master paintings…
The sources of the script: the experiences of the eyewitness Adolf Burger
Adolf Burger, a professional printer from the Slovakian town of Velká Lominca
(German: Grosslomnitz), was arrested and interned, along with his wife, for "political
reasons" in 1942. His young wife was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and he
himself was sent after one and a half years to the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp with other "specialists" to build up the Nazis’ secret counterfeit workshop.
On May 5, 1945 he was freed by U.S. troops at a subcamp of the Ebensee
concentration camp. He returned to Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a printer
again. He wrote down his recollections in "The Devil’s Workshop. The Counterfeit
Money Workshop of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp" (Hentrich & Hentrich,
Berlin, 2006). It became his mission to disseminate the memories of his experiences
and of that particular time. Now in his 90s, Burger continues to travel tirelessly, to
hold lectures and give talks in schools to tell youths about his life and provide
information about what really happened.
Legends surrounding the "treasure in Lake Toplitz" – The whereabouts of the
counterfeit money from "Operation Bernhard"
Under the title "Geld wie Heu" (Tons of Money), "Stern" magazine reported in 1959
about a sensational find of counterfeit British pound notes in Lake Toplitz in Austria.
Nine crates full of counterfeit money were found, along with secret S.S. archives.
Once "Stern" had reported about the crates of counterfeit money, more and more
rumors began spreading about the Third Reich’s secret gold reserves and stolen art,
which were said to have been sunk deep into Lake Toplitz. Local residents
remembered how soldiers forced them to take their boats out onto the lake towards
the end of the war, and they also remembered the mysterious crates lowered into the
water… This soon gave rise to the legend of sunken gold, and the lake turned into a
mecca for treasure seekers from all over the world.
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Lake Toplitz is ca. two kilometers long and 103 meters deep, and from a depth of 20
meters its water no longer contains oxygen. Many tree trunks that were thrown into
the lake and that do not rot, make the divers’ job difficult and very dangerous. Many
treasure hunters have nevertheless tried their luck. But in 1963, after a number of
mysterious accidents and the death of a young diver during an unauthorized search,
the Austrian authorities issued a prohibition to dive into Lake Toplitz. In order to put
an end to the dangerous diving expeditions and the myth of the Nazi gold once and
for all, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior launched a sweeping search. Up into the
1980s, divers of the Austrian armed forces and the mine defusing team retrieved not
only more crates filled with counterfeit money and printing plates, but also a
considerable amount of Nazi war material as well. With the bombs, rockets, mines,
explosives and other weapons found there, the lake became known as the "Dump of
the Third Reich."