Untold Stories, Hidden Facts & Curiosities of World War II — What’s Not in the Textbooks · by Dr. Christian Hardinghaus
Operation Bernhard: How the SS Forged British Pounds in Sachsenhausen
In a sealed barrack inside Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the SS forced skilled prisoners to print British banknotes. The plan was to hurt Britain and pay for secret operations. It never came close to wrecking the British economy, but it became one of the largest counterfeiting programs in history.
Oranienburg, north of Berlin, 1943. Behind a fence inside Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks, Blocks 18 and 19, are sealed off from the rest of the camp. Inside, Jewish prisoners with skills in printing and banking work in shifts. Their task is to copy Bank of England notes so well that no cashier can tell the difference. Refusing is not an option.
01The Story: Operation Bernhard
The idea of attacking Britain with forged money is older than the barracks. The Sachsenhausen Memorial dates planning for Operation Andreas to 1939. In 1942, the project was reorganized as Operation Bernhard: the notes were to finance German intelligence operations abroad.
The operation is named after SS-Sturmbannführer Bernhard Krüger, who ran it from Sachsenhausen. The Sachsenhausen Memorial records 142 Jewish prisoners selected for the counterfeiting unit and isolated from the rest of the camp. Survivors report better food and lodging than elsewhere in the camp, but they remained prisoners, under the constant threat of being killed once they were no longer needed.
The team had to solve every detail: paper, watermark, engraving, serial numbers. The notes were £5, £10, £20 and £50.
The SS used the forged money to pay spies and purchase supplies abroad.
Production stopped in February or March 1945. The prisoners were moved to Mauthausen, then Redl-Zipf and finally Ebensee in Austria. Remaining notes and plates were sunk in Alpine lakes, including Lake Toplitz. Because of chaotic transport the prisoners were not shot as ordered. The guards fled, and American troops liberated Ebensee around 6 May 1945.
02Why It’s Not in the Textbooks
School accounts of World War II rarely cover economic warfare, and a forgery sounds like a caper. That is the problem. Operation Bernhard was a state program built on the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners. The men who survived it did so because the SS needed their skills, not out of mercy, and outside Blocks 18 and 19 the camp system killed on a vast scale.
The story lived on mostly in memoirs and in film. Adolf Burger, a printer and one of the prisoners, published his memoir in 1983. It became the basis of the film The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), which won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Boxes and plates were recovered from Lake Toplitz in several searches from the late 1950s onward.
✚Myth-Check
The claim: “The forgeries were so perfect that they almost destroyed the British economy.”
The quality was high, and the Bank of England took the threat seriously: it withdrew notes worth more than £5 from circulation. But the total output is disputed (the Sachsenhausen Memorial gives a total face value of more than £135 million), and only a fraction ever entered circulation, much of it through the SS’s own purchases abroad. The Bank of England describes another revealing clue: a serial number already recorded as paid appeared again. Britain’s economy was never close to collapse.
Verdict: MYTH
The Charité Spy
False identities, coded messages and a deadly game of deception: my WWII spy thriller, inspired by true events, is set in Berlin in 1944 – on the other side of the same shadow war.
About the Book Amazon🗂 Decode This File
- SS and the camp system → Command & Compliance — Nazi Organizations
- Ranks like Sturmbannführer → Rank & Reputation — Military Ranks
- SD, RSHA and the Nazi state → Nazi Germany Encyclopedia 1933–1945
- Deception as a weapon → Operation Mincemeat: The True Story of the Man Who Never Was
03Sources & Further Reading
- Burger, Adolf. Des Teufels Werkstatt (memoir), 1983.
- Malkin, Lawrence. Krueger’s Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19. Little, Brown, 2006.
- Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum: Eine echte Fälschung (collection object and history of the counterfeiting unit; German).
- Bank of England Museum, Alison Cook (26 January 2024): Operation Bernhard (banknotes, detection and countermeasures).
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The 80th Academy Awards, 2008 (The Counterfeiters).
