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At Nazi Camps, Counterfeiting Ring Saved Mr. Burger; Today a Movie and Book Recount a Massive Plot To Weaken British Pound Marcus Walker and Almut Schoenfeld. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 22, 2007. pg. A.1 Author(s): Marcus Walker and Almut Schoenfeld Publication title: Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 22, 2007. pg. A.1 Source type: Newspaper ISSN: 00999660 ProQuest document ID: 1198942271 Text Word Count 1188 Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1198942271&sid=1&Fmt=3&cl ientId=23440&RQT=309&VName=PQD Abstract (Document Summary) An Austrian filmmaker has made a new movie about the counterfeiting operation called "The Forger," based partly on Mr. Burger's memoir. It is to be released in Germany and Austria in March. Mr. [Burger] advised on the script but says he couldn't keep it from giving his tale the Hollywood treatment. "There are two bedroom scenes," he says, rolling his eyes.

Mr. [Smolianoff] eventually achieved a breakthrough and the first fake dollars were printed. "I was just an ordinary book printer," says Mr. Burger. "Smolianoff was in another class."

"What's the point of doing my portrait? We're all going through the chimney anyway," Mr. Burger recalls saying to Mr. Smolianoff that day in 1944. "You never know, you never know," the Russian replied. "Just sit."

PRAGUE -- Adolf Burger, a sprightly 89-year-old survivor of Nazi concentration camps, held up one of the British GBP 5 notes he helped forge for the Germans during the war.

"Britannia was hard" to render, he said, pointing to the female symbol of Great Britain, a toga-wearing woman with spear and shield drawn in the note's top left-hand corner.

Mr. Burger was a reluctant player in one of the biggest attempts at financial sabotage in history. The Nazis forced Mr. Burger and about 140 other Jewish prisoners -- all marked for liquidation -- to forge so much British currency that by 1945, 12% of all pound-sterling bills in existence, measured by face value, were fake.

Mr. Burger published a short memoir after the war, and then didn't talk about the war for decades, he says. In the 1970s, a book by a German Holocaust denier so incensed him that he took early retirement and began collecting photos and documents to prove what he had seen in the concentration camps.

After publishing another, bigger memoir, he began a one-man campaign to tell young Germans what he had witnessed. Since the end of the Cold War he has traveled all over Germany, telling his story of Holocaust horrors, counterfeiting and survival to audiences at high schools, German army bases and police departments.

"When he tells his story, he's as lively as a 40-year-old," says Jurgen-Peter Schmidt, former head of anticounterfeit police in Hamburg, who has heard Mr. Burger speak.

An Austrian filmmaker has made a new movie about the counterfeiting operation called "The Forger," based partly on Mr. Burger's memoir. It is to be released in Germany and Austria in March. Mr. Burger advised on the script but says he couldn't keep it from giving his tale the Hollywood treatment. "There are two bedroom scenes," he says, rolling his eyes.

If Germany had been able to drop the fake fortune on Britain as planned, it could have undermined trust in the currency and crippled the British economy, according to "Krueger's Men," by American author Lawrence Malkin, the first comprehensive account of the saga.

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Instead, the effort largely flopped. Corrupt German agents skimmed off millions. When the war ended, some of the money even ended up in the hands of the Jewish underground, which used it to smuggle Jewish refugees to Palestine.

Mr. Burger's forgery career began after the Nazis broke up Czechoslovakia in early 1939. In addition to his day job as a book printer, he joined an underground communist cell that printed false papers to save Jews. Eventually arrested by the Gestapo, he and his wife, Gisela, were put on a train to Auschwitz, where his wife died in the gas chamber. He was picked for work squads. He narrowly evaded one detail's mass execution, and starvation rations reduced his weight to under 80 pounds, he recalls. The SS injected him with typhus in a medical experiment. And a guard knocked his teeth out with a rifle butt, just because he shared a first name with Adolf Hitler, he says.

After nearly two years of struggle to stay alive, Mr. Burger was recruited by an SS officer named Bernhard Kruger to the top-secret Operation Bernhard.

At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, Mr. Kruger ran a hutch within the camp: two long wooden huts sealed off by fences and roofed over with barbed wire. Other inmates never saw his prisoners.

Capt. Kruger and his team of SS guards spared their Jewish prisoners the degradations they had known previously in Nazi camps, according to Mr. Malkin's account. The inmates had decent food, civilian clothes, cigarettes, books and board games. They even received parcels from outside. They were allowed to grow their hair and listen to the radio. They worked eight-hour days. They had Sundays off. Mr. Burger played ping-pong with the SS.

The handpicked prisoners, prewar professionals in fine arts, printing or banking, manned a forgery factory whose main product was British pounds.

The inmates were to be killed when the project ended, and they knew it. Those who fell ill weren't taken to see a doctor, to whom they might reveal something; they were shot. Inmates' only hope was to keep counterfeiting successfully until the war was over.

"We were dead men on vacation," says Mr. Burger.

Mr. Burger befriended the only career criminal in the group, a Russian master forger named Salomon Smolianoff, who was known to police across prewar Europe.

In early 1945, leaders of the SS decided they had enough sterling. They switched their attention to forging dollars. Capt. Kruger gave Mr. Smolianoff, Mr. Burger and two others the job of figuring out how to copy $100 bills -- even trickier than the Bank of England's notes. Initial results were poor.

Fearing the end of the operation, the inmates stalled for time. "As the production of English pounds [had] finished already, all the hope of the 140-man group was based on our work" with dollar bills, Mr. Smolianoff later told Allied investigators. The typed record of Mr. Smolianoff's postwar interrogation by a U.S. Secret Service agent is reproduced on Mr. Malkin's Web site.

Mr. Smolianoff eventually achieved a breakthrough and the first fake dollars were printed. "I was just an ordinary book printer," says Mr. Burger. "Smolianoff was in another class."

Before mass production of dollars got under way, the advance of the Soviet army forced the SS to whisk away the forgers, their machines and counterfeit loot.

By various accounts, the caravan headed for Ebensee in the Austrian Alps, the last concentration camp in Nazi hands. The SS dumped the money in a lake and planned to blow up the forgers in a mountain tunnel. But with U.S. troops bearing down, the guards fled before they could execute the inmates. Mr. Burger and his colleagues were free.

In all, the money makers of Sachsenhausen forged nearly GBP 133 million, which would be worth around $6 billion in today's money. Most of it never reached Britain: The war-wracked Luftwaffe lacked the planes to drop it.

According to Mr. Malkin's account, agents of the SS's intelligence arm used some of the money to pay for spies and supplies. So many fake pounds circulated in Europe and the Middle East that sterling fell into disrepute, losing 75% of its value on the black market.

Today, Mr. Burger's house in a Prague suburb is an archive of photographs, documents and memories of the events he survived. He retains only a few specimens of the phony money he helped print. His most valued souvenir is a charcoal portrait of himself, hanging next to his bed, drawn by Mr. Smolianoff one day in Sachsenhausen.

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Clambering about his bookshelves on a stepladder, Mr. Burger said the huge counterfeiting scam of the SS exposes an important side of the Third Reich.

"The Nazis murdered millions for ideological reasons, but they were also ordinary criminals," he said.

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