Holocaust survivor Adolf Burger, who was forced by the Nazis to counterfeit British banknotes, died in Prague on Tuesday at the age of 99.
During World War II, before his native country Slovakia deported its Jewish citizens to German concentration camps in 1942, Burger, a typographer, received government-sponsored waivers from deportation for his skills that were considered indispensable for the country’s economy. Meanwhile, he started printing false baptismal certificates for Jews to help them evade deportation. He was arrested for this enterprise in August 1942, and he and his wife were deported to Auschwitz. His wife was murdered at the camp and he was selected for Operation Bernhard, a secret Nazi plan to destabilize the British economy by flooding the global economy and the British Empire with forged Bank of England £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes.
It was the largest counterfeiting operation in the history of economic warfare, and the first that employed the full technical, scientific, and management expertise of a sovereign state to produce and deploy bogus currency with the aim of destabilizing an enemy’s economic standing.
Burger was transferred from Auschwitz to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and eventually to the Mauthausen camp network, where he was liberated by the US Army in May 1945.
Burger wrote his memoirs, and in the 1970s told the NY Times, “When I was liberated by the Americans I went home very calmly, never had a bad dream. […] For years I was silent, I didn’t want to speak about this any more. It was only when the neo-Nazis started with their lies about Auschwitz that I began.”
His memoirs, titled The Commando of Counterfeiters, were published in 1983. Adolf Burger visited London to launch the book, and visited the Bank of England, where the Chief Cashier presented him with one of the notes which he had forged in the concentration camp more than sixty years earlier.
Screenwriter and director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters received an Oscar in 2008. Burger, who checked every draft of the screenplay, is played by the German actor August Diehl.