Is The Counterfeiters a True Story? The Real History of Operation Bernhard

World Cinema with Anna | Film Club Companion

Yes. The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher, 2007) is based on a true story: Operation Bernhard, a Nazi scheme that forced Jewish concentration camp prisoners to forge British banknotes. The film draws on the memoir of one of those prisoners, Adolf Burger. It is, however, a dramatisation. Names are changed, events are compressed and some conflicts are heightened. This post separates what really happened from what the film adds.

Content note: this post discusses the Holocaust and Nazi persecution.

At a glance

• Was Operation Bernhard real? Yes. It was a real Nazi counterfeiting operation run at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.
• Is the film based on a real person’s account? Yes. It is based on Adolf Burger’s memoir, and Burger acted as a consultant and checked the screenplay drafts.
• Is Sally Sorowitsch a real person? He is based on Salomon Smolianoff, a Russian-born Jewish master forger who worked on the operation.
• Is Herzog a real person? The character is based on SS Major Bernhard Krüger, who led the operation.
• Is everything in the film accurate? No. The director has described it as a feature film that is truthful but not a documentary.

What was Operation Bernhard?

The idea began in 1940 as Operation Andreas, a plan to flood Britain with forged banknotes. It was revived in 1942 as Operation Bernhard, named after SS Major Bernhard Krüger, who led it. The goal was to destabilise the British economy, and the forged notes were also used to pay for intelligence work and supplies.

In 1942 Krüger identified prisoners in concentration camps who had skills in engraving, printing, graphics and banking. He assembled a team of 142 Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen, working in Blocks 18 and 19 of the camp.

How the forgers worked

According to the Bank of England Museum, the prisoners studied large quantities of genuine banknotes and identified about 150 different security marks, the tiny deliberate flaws that were built into real notes to deter forgery. They engraved the image of Britannia, perfected the paper and forged the signatures. Teams of prisoners then aged the printed notes by rubbing and folding them, until they were indistinguishable by eye from genuine ones.

One thing defeated them: the numbering system. The forgers had to reuse serial numbers from real notes, and in 1943 a clerk in a British bank in Morocco noticed that a note had already been paid. The Bank of England eventually responded by withdrawing every note above £5.

Life inside the workshop

The prisoners in the forging unit were kept apart from the rest of the camp and were given better conditions than most inmates. Accounts mention radios, newspapers, proper beds and food. Burger recalled having white sheets on the beds. But this was never freedom. The prisoners lived with the constant fear that the SS would kill them once their work was finished, so that nobody could tell the world what they had done.

From pounds to dollars

After the British notes, the SS ordered the prisoners to forge American dollars. The dollar operation had not advanced far when the war turned against Germany. In early 1945 the unit was moved to Mauthausen in Austria and later to Ebensee, where the prisoners expected to be killed. They were liberated by US forces in early May 1945.

Sabotage is a central theme of the film, but Burger himself was cautious about it. He told the historian Roger Moorhouse that sabotage was barely possible in a concentration camp, because anyone who tried it risked being killed. He recalled that one prisoner, Jacobson, managed to delay the dollar production by around four weeks before the SS commander threatened to have the forgers shot.

What happened to the forged money?

• Use during the war: the notes reportedly helped to pay the spy Elyesa Bazna, codenamed Cicero, and to fund other Nazi operations, and some entered circulation.
• Lake Toplitz: as defeat approached, most of the remaining notes and some of the equipment were thrown into Lake Toplitz in Austria. In 1959 a diver found boxes of forged £5 notes. Press reports at first suggested a value of around £700 million, but later reports put the face value at £9 million, and these notes were destroyed.
• Afterwards: forged notes kept turning up in circulation for years. The Bank of England did not bring back the £10 note until 1964, followed by the £20 in 1970 and the £50 in 1981, all of them harder to counterfeit than the old white notes.
• Scale: estimates suggest roughly nine million notes with a face value above £130 million were produced, although figures vary by source.

Fact versus fiction in The Counterfeiters

• Sally Sorowitsch: this character is based on Salomon Smolianoff, a Russian-born Jewish forger who was one of the prisoners in the operation. The film invents or heightens much of Sally’s personality and personal story.
• Herzog: the character is based on Bernhard Krüger, who in real life was an SS officer in charge of the operation. The film gives Herzog a personal history with Sally that is a dramatic device, and accounts of when and by whom the real Smolianoff was first arrested differ.
• Adolf Burger: he is a real person who survived the operation. In the film he becomes the voice of resistance and pushes for sabotage. In his own account he was more cautious about how much sabotage was possible.
• The central conflict: the clash between Sally’s pragmatic survival instinct and Burger’s moral stand is the film’s dramatic core. It reflects a real dilemma, but it is the film’s shaping of events rather than a record of them.
• The Monte Carlo frame: the film opens and closes with Sally gambling after the war. This is a storytelling device, and details of Smolianoff’s real life after the war are sparse and sometimes contradictory.
• Departures from history: the film compresses time and combines characters. Burger knew the film would be a feature rather than a documentary, and he approved the departures from real life.

What happened to the people?

• Adolf Burger survived, wrote the memoir that inspired the film and died in Prague in 2016, aged 99. You can read more in our post [Adolf Burger: The Real Survivor Behind The Counterfeiters].
• Salomon Smolianoff later lived in South America and died in Brazil in 1976.
• Bernhard Krüger was detained by the British for two years after the war and died in 1989.

Why the true story matters

The Counterfeiters is unusual among Holocaust films because it centres on a morally complicated question: what does survival cost, and what do we owe to others when we are under pressure? Understanding the real history makes those questions sharper. It also reminds us that the people forced into Operation Bernhard were real individuals with skills, families and impossible choices.

If you would like to explore these questions in a group, our discussion guide for Die Welle (The Wave) includes a section comparing the two films. Both suit Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.

Sources

• Bank of England Museum: Operation Bernhard
• Boston Globe obituary of Adolf Burger
• Roger Moorhouse’s interview with Adolf Burger
• The Hollywood Reporter: The Counterfeiters, a true Holocaust story
• Film Forward review of The Counterfeiters
• Salomon Smolianoff (Wikipedia)
• The Collector: Operation Bernhard