One Bite at a Time

Operation Bernhard was the codename of a secret Nazi plan devised during the Second World War by the RSHA and the SS to destabilise the British economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes. It is the largest counterfeiting operation in history and has been fictionalised in books, the BBC comedy-drama miniseries Private Schulz and a 2007 Oscar-winning Austrian film, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher).

The plan was directed by, and named after, Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer (SS Major) Bernhard Krüger, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp at first, and then from other camps, especially Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, the work of engraving the complex printing plates, developing the appropriate rag-based paper with the correct watermarks, and breaking the code to generate valid serial numbers was extremely difficult, but by the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being almost impossible to distinguish from the real currency.

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From late 1943, approximately one million notes per month were printed. Many were transferred from SS headquarters to a former hotel near Meran in South Tyrol, Northern Italy, from where they were laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and German secret agents operating in the Allied countries. It is alleged that counterfeit currency was used to finance the rescue of the arrested former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943, but there is no evidence to confirm this.

The Bank of England first learned of a plot from a spy as early as 1939. It detected the existence of the notes in 1943, and declared them “the most dangerous ever seen.”

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