Operation Bernhard
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Operation Bernhard was the name of a secret German plan devised during the Second World War to destabilise the British economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes.
A fully researched account,based on declassified archives inLondon, Washington, and elsewhere, was published in 2006 as "Krueger's Men" by Lawrence Malkin. A fictitious version of the Operation Bernhard story was the topic of a comedy drama serial called Private Schulz (starring Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson) produced by the BBC in 1980.
The real plan was directed by, and named after, SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Bernhard Krüger, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from among inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp at first, and then from others 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 there 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 although not impossible to distinguish from the real thing.
Although the initial plan was to destabilise the British economy by dropping the notes from aircraft, on the assumption that while some honest people would hand them in most people would keep the notes, in practice this plan 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. Instead, from late 1943 approximately one million notes per month were printed, and many were transferred from SS headqurtars to a former hotel near Merano (Meran) in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, Northern Italy, from where it was 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 first 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. They were recorded, like all notes, in handwritten ledgers still in the Bank's archives (every banknote issued by the Bank of England as late as the 1940s was recorded in large leather-bound ledgers, as the notes were a liability of the bank), it was noted that one of the notes had already been recorded as having been paid off.
Following the evacuation of Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiting team was transferred to Redl-Zipf in Austria, a sub-camp of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At the beginning of May 1945 the team was ordered to be transferred to the Ebensee sub-camp, where they were all to be killed together; however their SS guards had only one truck to convey their prisoners, so it was necessary for the truck to make three trips. On the third trip the truck broke down, 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 Ebensee camp revolted and refused to be be moved into tunnels, where they presumably were to have been blown up. The delayed arrival of the third batch therefore saved the lives of all. Then the American army arrived, and the prisoners dispersed among the other sixteen thousand prisoners in the camp. Thus, because of the order that the prisoners all be killed together, none were actually killed. They were liberated from Ebensee by US forces on 5 May 1945. 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 the denominations until the early 1960s (£10), 1970 (£20), and 1980 (£50).
The counterfeiting team also 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.
German spy Elyesa Bazna (codename "Cicero") was paid with counterfeit notes, and unsuccessfully sued the German government after the war for outstanding pay.
After the war, Major Krüger was detained by the English 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 that he had been responsible for saving their lives. He later worked for the company which had produced the special paper for the Operation Bernhard forgeries. He died in 1989.
[edit] Further Reading
- 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 Geldfaelscher" (2006) ISBN 978-3-7857-3349-7 (ab 1.2. 2007)
[edit] 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 4 documentary on Operation Bernhard.
- Private Schultz at the Internet Movie Database - the BBC comedy based on Operation Bernhard.
- Die Fälscher (2007, Germany) at the Internet Movie Database
