Adolf Burger: The Real Survivor Behind The Counterfeiters

World Cinema with Anna | Film Club Companion

When The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the story it told had not been invented for the screen. It came from the memoir of a man who lived it: Adolf Burger, a Jewish printer from Slovakia who was forced to forge banknotes for the Nazis and survived to tell the world.

This post looks at who he was, what he endured and how his testimony became a film.

Content note: this post discusses the Holocaust, including Auschwitz and the murder of Burger’s wife.

Who was Adolf Burger?

Adolf Burger was born on 12 August 1917 in Veľká Lomnica, a village in what is now northern Slovakia, into a Jewish family. His father died when he was four and the family was poor, but Burger later described his childhood as a happy one. He trained as a printer and, from 1939, worked at a printing house in Bratislava. As a young man he and his siblings belonged to a Zionist youth movement preparing to emigrate to Palestine. His siblings left before the war. Burger stayed.

Forging papers to save lives

During the war, Slovakia began deporting its Jewish citizens in 1942. Burger’s skills as a typographer had earned him a waiver from deportation, and he used his trade to help others: he printed false baptismal certificates for Jews who were due to be deported. Under the rules at the time, baptism could offer some people protection.

The scheme was discovered in 1942. Burger was arrested, held in Žilina and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his wife, Gisela (spelled Gizela in some sources). She was murdered there later that year at the age of 22. Burger became Prisoner No. 64401.

Operation Bernhard

Burger’s printing skills are what kept him alive. In 1944 he was chosen for Operation Bernhard, a secret Nazi plan, ordered by Heinrich Himmler and led by SS Major Bernhard Krüger, to forge British banknotes in the hope of destabilising Britain’s economy. Roughly 140 prisoners from many countries, selected for their professional skills, were brought to a closed-off section of Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. They produced forged Bank of England notes, along with stamps, passports and other documents, and later began work on American dollars.

The forged notes were extraordinarily good, but Germany never managed to deliver them to Britain. For the prisoners, the work offered a chance of survival with no guarantee of it. Burger later described the feeling as being “corpses on holiday,” and said he had been sure that the Nazis meant to kill the forgers once their work was done so they could never talk.

The question of sabotage

In the film, Burger pushes the other prisoners to resist by sabotaging the dollar production, and this creates the central moral conflict with the more pragmatic Sally. The real story was less clear-cut. In an interview with the historian Roger Moorhouse, Burger said that sabotage was barely possible inside a concentration camp, because anyone who attempted it risked being killed. He recalled that a fellow prisoner named Jacobson managed to delay the dollar production by about four weeks before the SS commander threatened to have them shot.

The film dramatises a dilemma that was real: how to survive when staying alive means helping the people who persecute you, and what resistance costs.

Liberation

As the Allies advanced, the forgers were moved to Mauthausen in Austria in early 1945 and then to Ebensee. Burger expected to be killed. Instead, the SS fled and he was liberated by US troops in early May 1945. Burger took photographs of his fellow prisoners shortly after liberation, and these appeared in the first book he wrote, published in Prague that same year.

After the war

Burger returned to Prague and gave his testimony about Operation Bernhard to the police almost immediately. He remarried, had three children and ran a printing works until the political upheavals of the early 1950s. He later worked in Prague’s municipal offices.

His first account, Number 64401 Speaks, appeared in 1945. Over the following decades he rewrote and expanded his story, published in Czech as Komando padělatelů (The Commando of Counterfeiters) in 1983 and in English as The Devil’s Workshop. He has said that growing Holocaust denial pushed him to publish. He also spoke to school students, especially in Germany, about what he had witnessed. When he visited London to launch the English edition, the Bank of England presented him with one of the notes he had forged in the camp more than sixty years earlier.

From memoir to film

Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky adapted Burger’s memoir for the screen, and Burger checked every draft of the screenplay. In the film, Burger is played by August Diehl, while Karl Markovics plays Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch, a character inspired by a real counterfeiter who worked on Operation Bernhard. The film is a dramatisation, so some characters and events are compressed or invented, but its core, the forced forgery, the moral pressure and the fight to survive, rests on Burger’s account.

Legacy

Adolf Burger died in Prague on 6 December 2016, aged 99. He was one of the last two survivors of Operation Bernhard. Through his memoir, his lectures to young people and the film, he made sure the story would not be forgotten or denied.

Why his story matters

Burger’s testimony reminds us that the Holocaust happened to real individuals, with names, skills and families. It also raises questions that still matter: what do we owe to others when we are under pressure, and when is cooperation survival and when is it complicity? These questions are at the heart of our film club discussion of The Counterfeiters, and they connect with our guide to Die Welle (The Wave), where Part 5 compares the two films. Both resources suit Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.

A note on sources

Small details differ between accounts, including the spelling of Burger’s birthplace, the number of prisoners involved (140 to 142) and estimates of how many notes were produced. Where sources disagree, this post keeps to the points they have in common. Sources include:

• Radio Prague International interview with Adolf Burger
• Roger Moorhouse’s interview with Adolf Burger
• World Jewish Congress obituary
• Boston Globe obituary
• Memory of Nations profile
• Kam po česku profile
• The Devil’s Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation by Adolf Burger