The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Adolf Burger: forger and survivor

December 2nd, 2008

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Adolf Burger: forger and survivor

A Jew forced into a Nazi counterfeiting scheme has inspired a new film

By Jeff White
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 21st, 2007 issue

RENÉ JAKL/THE PRAGUE POST

Burger, who survived the Third Reich's attempt at destroying the British economy while interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, is now a celebrity in Germany.

The German television crew was growing more impatient by the minute, pacing, checking mobile phones, testing a strobe light against an empty chair where the interview subject would sit, if he were present. But Adolf Burger was running late.

“He has overbooked himself,” the producer said. “But, you know, he is old.”

RENÉ JAKL/THE PRAGUE POST

British bank notes proved easy to fake.

Burger, 89, a short, bowlegged man, had already changed out of black flannel sweats into trousers and was busy giving a newspaper interview. Reporters from a German daily were due later in the day. The Wall Street Journal had recently been by his modest home in Prague 4–Spořilov.

“I will tell you briefly how I became a counterfeiter,” Burger was saying, as if to give those waiting hope. But there was nothing quick about the story he had to tell, which rambled through the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust before settling on the Faustian deal he made that almost certainly saved his life.

Burger and about 140 others — all Jews and marked for death — were pressed into service as part of arguably the largest attempted financial scam in history: the Nazi’s plan to counterfeit British and U.S. bank notes worth billions in today’s money.

Photo courtesy of Beta Cinema

August Diehl, right, plays Burger in The Counterfeiters, just screened at the Berlinale.

The fake bills financed German spies, weapons and propaganda and were intended to bring the allies’ economies crashing down. Of course, it didn’t happen that way.

Burger has been talking about this nearly forgotten — to some, unheard-of — chapter of World War II for years. But now, The Counterfeiter, a feature film based on his memoirs that debuted recently at the Berlinale film festival and will open in German and Austrian theaters next month, is bringing the media to his door.

“It’s because of the movie,” the producer said. “I’ve known Mr. Burger for three years, and I have tried to get people and stations interested in his story. Now that there is this movie, everyone is interested.”

With the same stabbing hand gestures he uses to talk about his past, Burger brushes off a suggestion that he has become a celebrity.

“Fame is short-lived, so I don’t feel anything,” he said. “For me, the important thing is that people in Germany and here will learn about what the Nazis were able to do. That is important to me.”

The young printer

Burger’s story begins with the alliance between Hitler and Monsignor Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest who was president of an independent Slovak state from 1939–45. The two agreed that the Nazis, who seized all of Czechoslovakia in 1939, would stop with the annexation of Bohemia and Moravia while Tiso promised to create a neighboring fascist (and Catholic) state.

Tiso struck a deal with the Nazis whereby Jews who had converted to Catholicism before 1938 could be called Aryans, and thus avoid persecution.

At the time, Burger, a Slovak born on the slopes of the High Tatra Mountains, was a 22-year-old living in Bratislava and working at a book-printing plant.

“It was possible for me to be able to work because Slovakia had a shortage of doctors and printers. There were no professionals, so I had an exception. I did not have to wear the Jewish star,” he said.

But Tiso had banned all political parties, so many went underground. Soon, some parties were approaching Burger to forge birth certificates and official documents for Jews, saying they had been born Catholic or had converted before 1938.

“I was young at the time, and I didn’t understand what the underground or illegal work was,” he said. “But I was thinking that if it saves people’s lives, I’ll do it.”

He and a small band of six kept up the scheme for three years, saving thousands of lives. Then the Gestapo found out.

On the evening of Aug. 11, 1942, Burger’s 25th birthday, they came for him. They questioned him and his wife, Gisela, for three days, then put them on a train north, to Auschwitz.

“And that was it,” he said. “And then it was one thing after another.”

‘Dead men on holiday’

How do you ask someone who lost his wife to the gas chambers if he eventually remarried?

In the end, you don’t, taking as a hint the way in which Burger quickly passes over the subject of Gisela’s death. You wonder about the older woman who occasionally peaks down his apartment’s stairs from the first-floor kitchen, only to later learn that she is just someone who looks in on him.

Burger and Gisela parted as so many did in Auschwitz, when he was directed one way, to the work camps, and she another.

Months of hard time followed: Burger was beaten, subjected to medical experiments and dodged one mass execution. His weight dropped to less than 80 pounds (36.4 kilograms).

Then, in early 1943, a man named Bernhard Krüger, looking among the emaciated and starving for printers and typographers, heard of Burger and recruited him for Operation Bernhard.

Krüger was the officer in charge of the Nazis’ counterfeiting operation, which, by April 1943, had been running for two years.

The whole program had its headquarters in two long, wooden barracks deep in the forest near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. There, state-of-the-art printing presses turned out nearly perfect forgeries of £5, £10 and £20 bank notes.

The 142 men who were kept prisoner there — among them 15 from Czechoslovakia, including Burger — were allowed special privileges: regular meals, new clothes, leather shoes, books and board games, free Sundays. Burger said he often played pingpong with the SS officers.

They knew they would be killed when the operation ended — so, they worked slow and faked technical glitches. They also worked through sickness, knowing they’d be shot rather than turned over to a doctor who might learn of the scheme.

“We had everything there, but in the evening, when we lay down, I knew I was a dead man,” he said. “I called us dead men on holiday, because it was a holiday compared to Auschwitz. But we were predestined to die.”

Few in the printing plant, including Burger, claimed expertise at forging. Then there was Salomon Smolianoff.

Burger’s best friend, Smolianoff was a Russian hardened by years of running from the law before the war, and had gained a reputation across Europe as a master counterfeiter.

By early 1945, Operation Bernhard had printed more than £130 million, worth about $6 billion (130 billion Kč) today. Krüger turned to Burger and Smolianoff and charged them with finding a way to forge U.S. dollars, a considerably harder feat.

They did. But the operation wasn’t able to shift its focus before the Allies closed in.

The Nazis shut down the printing plant and herded the workers onto a caravan bound, according to several accounts, for the Austrian Alps, one of the Nazis’ last strongholds — dumping crates of money in a lake along the way.

Burger believed they intended to kill them all in a mountain tunnel. Instead, the SS officers abandoned the convoy and fled.

A story with parallels

Burger settled in Prague after the war, and for almost 30 years he didn’t talk about what he endured. Then a spate of Holocaust denial in Germany in the 1970s spurred him to begin collecting documentation of what he had seen and experienced in those years.

That led to a memoir, The Devil’s Workshop, and for much of the past 17 years Burger has told his story to audiences across Germany.

Two German film producers, Babette Schröder and Nina Bohlmann, read the memoir six years ago and saw its potential. They approached Burger about adapting it, and also reached out to Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, who saw the universal metaphor in Burger’s story.

“Asking whether people should play table tennis in a concentration camp while others around them are being tortured is the same as asking whether we should be allowed to live such affluent lives when there is so much suffering in the world,” Ruzowitzky told Deutsche Welle earlier this month.

Burger consulted on the script for The Counterfeiters, and said he liked the end product.

The Nazis never wreaked the kind of havoc they had wanted to with the counterfeit loot — most of it never made it into British circulation. SS officers embezzled a lot of it for their own enrichment. After the war, a fair amount reportedly financed underground Jewish groups, which, ironically, used the money to secretly relocate Holocaust survivors to Palestine.

Burger held on to a few notes. Sitting in a straight-back chair, he pointed at them, under glass, their edges rough and time-worn.

There was a portrait of Burger, done in what looked like charcoal, propped against a shelf nearby. He reached for it.

Smolianoff sketched it one day in 1944. “Why?” Burger had asked at the time, knowing their days were numbered.

Smolianoff said: “You never know.”

Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Jeff White can be reached at jwhite@praguepost.com

Reader's comments:

add your comment

[13:31 19/05/2008] : I watched the film on DVD for the first time. I found it fascinating and obviously disturbing too. Like others, I would like to read Adolf's memoir. Does anyone know if there are plans for it to be published in English? Ben

Ben Walsh
London

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