Nazis picked Jews as forgers in secret World War II plot

Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19
by Lawrence Malkin, Little Brown, 2006, 285 pages, $24.99

by Jack Fischel
emeritus professor of history at Millersville University, Pennsylvania, is the author of The Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1998) and The Holocaust and Its Religious Impact (Praeger).
Special to NJ Jewish News
05.31.07

Sidebar: The lucky ones

This riveting account of the Nazi plot to flood Great Britain with counterfeit pounds so as to disrupt the country's wartime economy reads like a novel but is, in fact, an almost totally neglected episode of World War II history. Malkin, a journalist, has painstakingly traced the main characters and the decision-making process that led the cash-poor Nazi government to turn to the production of counterfeit money to supplement its war against the Allies.

Under the direction of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the SS selected Bernhard Krueger, a textile engineer by training and an SS forger by assignment, as chief of the operation that bore his name. To set "Operation Bernhard" into action, from the autumn of 1942 to the autumn of 1944, Krueger assembled a crew of just over 140 mainly Jewish concentration camp prisoners from 15 nations, representing 55 trades or professions. The group included Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz who were selected by Krueger and then moved to the Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp located outside of Berlin. (Although technically not an extermination camp, 18,000 Russian prisoners were executed in Sachsenhausen in 1941.) It was in blocks 19 and 20 of the camp that the Operation Bernhard prisoners not only produced the counterfeit pounds but also forged passports and identification documents. In addition, they made visas, date markings, and rubber stamps reproduced from items found in seized banks and government offices in German-occupied countries.

Jews were chosen to carry out the project because the SS knew that at its conclusion, "the mouths of the prisoners were to be sealed forever," effectively squelching any testimony on the activities. However, like the story of the telling of A Thousand and One Nights, "as long as the Jewish printers, graphic artists, and accountants continued to produce the almost undetectable forgeries, the Nazis would keep them alive."

Although the British eventually uncovered the plot, this did not prevent the Nazis from flooding the rest of Europe with the counterfeit money. Ironically, some of the Operation Bernhard money-launderers were Jews. They were chosen because the Nazis believed that as Jews, they were more likely to be trusted by their unsuspecting victims. One such Jewish money launderer, Jaac van Harten, masquerading as an officer of the International Red Cross, passed millions of counterfeit bills in wartime Budapest — acquiring along the way a suitcase of jewels for himself.

Krueger's Men tells a compelling story; it is well worth reading in book form and would make an exciting film.

‘The lucky ones'

— From Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19 by Lawrence Malkin