Last member of Nazi forgery ring dies
Czech Republic: The experience, Adolf Burger would later recall, was like being ‘‘corpses on holiday.’’ Imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, he was detailed to Operation Bernhard, a massive Nazi plot that relied on concentration camp inmates to forge British currency.
The fake bank notes - a total of more than £130 million - were to be dropped by Luftwaffe airplanes over England in an attempt to upset the British economy. Although ultimately aborted, the top-secret plan, unknown at the time even to the camp commandant, is believed to have been one of the largest attempts ever at financial sabotage.
Because the scheme depended on the labor and skill of inmates craftsmen, bankers, at least one professional counterfeiter and book printers such as Burger - the prisoners received some special privileges, such as the provision of blankets, civilian clothing, cigarettes and extra food. But they knew that at any time they might be killed, and it was only amid the chaos as the Allies advanced in 1945 that they escaped execution.
‘‘In a way, it was worse than Auschwitz because we knew for certain they were going to kill us because of what we had done,’’ Burger later told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Burger, whose account of Operation Bernhard was later dramatised in the Oscar-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters, died on December 6 in Prague. He was 99.
Burger was born on August 12, 1917, to a Jewish family in Velka Lomnica, a village in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now northern Slovakia. Trained as a typographer, he did his earliest counterfeiting as a member of the Communist underground, producing false baptism papers in an effort to help Jews survive persecution.
Slovakia, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, was the first Axis partner to permit the deportation of its Jews for the Final Solution. Burger was arrested in 1942, the day before his 25th birthday, and deported with his wife, Gisela, to Auschwitz, where she perished.
‘‘I had two choices: either to go and touch the barbed wire with 1,000 voltage in it and be dead in a second, or stay alive,’’ Burger later said in a radio interview cited by the AP. ‘‘I chose life, so I can tell everyone what they have done here.’’
As the Allies closed in, the counterfeit operation was moved to camps in Austria, first Mauthausen and then Ebensee, where cases of the money were thrown into the waters of the Alpine Lake Toplitz.
Germany never managed to deliver the counterfeit money to England because of losses sustained by the Luftwaffe, Shannon said. Some of the bank notes were used to pay German spies and informants; others made their way to fleeing Nazi officials and, after the war, to refugee workers spiriting Jews into Palestine. The counterfeit cash was of such high quality that the Bank of England removed from circulation all notes worth more than £5 for two decades. - Washington Post