Operation Bernhard, 1942–45

01Sachsenhausen, autumn 1942

Two barracks became a secret print shop

The SS plan to flood Britain with forged money went back to the first months of the war: in 1939, says the Sachsenhausen memorial; in 1940, says the Bank of England Museum. Its first code name was Operation Andreas. It was revived in 1942 under SS-Sturmbannführer Bernhard Krüger of the RSHA Amt VI, and took his first name.

Krüger had several concentration camps searched for Jewish prisoners from the graphics trade, paper specialists or other skilled manual workers. In autumn 1942 the SS fitted out Barracks 18 and 19 of Sachsenhausen’s “small camp” as a print shop. By the memorial’s count, 142 Jewish prisoners were put to work there.

They knew that “illness, failure or termination of the operation would mean their death”.

They were kept apart from the rest of the camp. Their job was to make Bank of England notes that the Bank itself could not tell from its own.

A wooden barrack room with heavy timber posts, plank walls, windows along one side and rows of wooden tables and benches. — Inside a prisoner barrack at the Sachsenhausen memorial, 2024. The forgery workshop filled two barracks, 18 and 19, in the camp’s “small camp”.Photo: A.Savin / Wikimedia Commons / Free Art License

Sachsenhausen, London, and the road south

SS camps and officesBank of EnglandForged notesThe squad’s road

Land: Natural Earth. Modern borders are left out: in 1945 Austria was part of the Reich.

The long windowless stone wall and columns of the Bank of England along a busy London street, with a red bus in the distance. — The Bank of England on Threadneedle Street, London, the target of the forgery.Photo: It's No Game, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

1939–1940

The target: the Bank of England

The SS aimed at the pound itself. Operation Andreas, planned in Berlin from 1939 or 1940, was meant to forge the Bank of England’s notes.

A tall concrete obelisk with a column of red triangles near its top, against a deep blue sky. — The memorial obelisk on the former roll-call ground at Sachsenhausen, in Oranienburg north of Berlin.Photo: Alex Walker, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Autumn 1942

A print shop inside Sachsenhausen

The SS set up a secret print shop in Barracks 18 and 19 of the camp at Oranienburg, north of Berlin. 142 Jewish prisoners were forced to work in it.

Two views of a worn white £5 note: above, the printed front; below, the same note against light showing the watermarked lettering. — A forged white £5 note from Sachsenhausen, front and against the light. The Bank of England received more of these than of any other Bernhard forgery.Image: Bruce C. Cooper (Composite Digital Image). Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

21 September 1942

“A most dangerous likeness”

Nine forged £10 notes reached the Bank from Tangier, “of a most dangerous likeness to genuine notes”. Only the feel of the paper gave them away.

A wide paved square between long rows of low barrack buildings, a gatehouse at the far end, under a blue sky. — The roll-call square of the Mauthausen concentration camp, now a memorial, 2023. The forgery squad was brought here in February 1945.Photo: Hangman'sDeath / Wikimedia Commons / CC0

February 1945

The workshop is moved to Mauthausen

In February 1945 the SS moved the forgery squad south, to the Mauthausen camp in annexed Austria.

A massive weathered concrete bunker on a foggy field, with a shed beside it and bare trees behind. — The remains of the Redl-Zipf subcamp, code name “Schlier”: a concrete transformer bunker in Upper Austria, 2013. The SS cleared and burned the camp on 3 May 1945.Photo: Thomas Ledl, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Spring 1945

Redl-Zipf, code name “Schlier”

From Mauthausen the squad went on to the subcamp at Redl-Zipf. The SS cleared and burned the camp on 3 May 1945.

A lawn with rough memorial stones and a low border of rocks, conifers and a mountain behind. — The camp cemetery on the site of the Ebensee concentration camp, 2005. The forgery squad was liberated here by American troops.Photo: Corradox, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

6 May 1945

Liberated at Ebensee

The prisoners were taken to the Ebensee camp. American troops liberated it on 6 May 1945.

A long dark mountain lake between steep forested slopes, the mountains mirrored in still water. — Lake Toplitz in the Styrian Salzkammergut. In May 1945 SS men brought about sixty crates here.Photo: Blueangel, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Early May 1945

Crates in a mountain lake

In early May 1945 SS men took about 60 wooden crates to Lake Toplitz and sank them.

03The flood, 1943–45

In 1945, 15,544 forged £5 notes reached the Bank

From 1939 to 1942 the Bank saw a few dozen forged fivers a year. In 1943 it received 400. In 1945 it received 15,544, most of them the German type. The Bank believed that until the Allies invaded France the bulk of the output had stayed abroad.

The Bank had seen the danger early. It issued no note larger than £5 after 22 April 1943.

Forged £5 notes the Bank of England received, by year

Forged £5 notes of all kinds received through normal channels, from the Bank’s internal history; in 1945 most were the German type. Total 16,533.

04How much did they print?

£130 million to £135 million, depending on whom you ask

No one counted the whole output and published it. Guinness World Records gives £130 million; Lawrence Malkin gives £132 million; Sachsenhausen Memorial gives over £135 million, the last from secretly kept statistics. Guinness counts more than nine million notes.

The Bank of England made its own estimate from the serial prefixes it saw: 152 of them. If each, like its own, had been used for 100,000 notes, the forgers had printed over 15 million. That is an assumption, not a count. The Allies seized forgeries with a face value of more than £26 million at the end of the war.

Face value of the forgeries, by three counts

Each dot is one published figure; the band is the range. Tap a figure for its source.

05The Bank’s answer

Britain went 38 years without a £50 note

The Bank stopped issuing notes above £5 in April 1943. In autumn 1944 it prepared a new £5, and from 1945 its fivers carried a metal thread for the first time. On 16 April 1945 the old £10, £20, £50, £100, £500 and £1,000 notes ceased to be legal tender.

The larger notes came back only slowly: the £10 in 1964, the £20 in 1970 and the £50 in 1981, the Bank of England Museum records.

Years without the note: the Bank’s denominations above £5

From the last issue of notes above £5 (22 April 1943) to each note’s return, as the Bank of England Museum gives it.

06Austria, May 1945

The squad was liberated at Ebensee on 6 May

In February 1945 the SS packed up the workshop and moved its prisoners south: first to Mauthausen, then to the subcamp at Redl-Zipf, and finally to Ebensee in the Salzkammergut. Redl-Zipf was cleared and burned on 3 May 1945. American troops reached Ebensee on 6 May 1945.

Their work for the SS did not guarantee their lives. The memorial’s exhibition also tells of “those whom the SS murdered nonetheless”.

A black-and-white photograph of a crowd of prisoners in striped and civilian clothes waving at a camp gate hung with a large banner. — Survivors at Mauthausen cheer soldiers of the US 11th Armored Division, 6 May 1945. Ebensee, a Mauthausen subcamp where the forgers were held, was liberated the same day.Photo: Cpl. Donald R. Ornitz, US Army Signal Corps, 6 May 1945 (NARA 111-SC-206395). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A red booklet cover with white capitals reading Report on Forgery in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and a white £5 note stamped FAKE. — “Report on Forgery in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp”, a secret report by the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior, 1945, with a forged £5 note stamped FAKE on its cover.Image: Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior, 1945. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

07Lake Toplitz, 1945–64

The evidence went into a lake

In early May 1945, SS men took about 60 wooden crates to Lake Toplitz, a deep mountain lake in Styria, and sank them. In 1959 an expedition paid for by the magazine Der Stern raised crates of forged pound notes from the lake, and with them a prisoner list from Sachsenhausen.

An Austrian government search in 1963 brought up more notes and 44 printing blocks. On 28 April 1964 the notes were burned at the Austrian National Bank, with two officials of the Bank of England present. Divers raised more as late as 1984.

08The witness

Adolf Burger, printer, prisoner, witness

Burger was born in Veľká Lomnica, Slovakia on 12 August 1917 and trained as a printer. Arrested in 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, then sent to the forgery workshop at Sachsenhausen.

He spent the rest of his long life describing it. His memoir, published in English as The Devil’s Workshop, became the film Die Fälscher, which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2008. He died in 2016. The Sachsenhausen memorial keeps some of the forged notes.

An elderly man in a dark suit and tie speaking into microphones at a table. — Adolf Burger, a printer from Slovakia and one of the forgers, speaking at a Holocaust conference in Prague, 2006.Photo: D. Kraus, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Forced to forge for their lives, the prisoners of Barracks 18 and 19 made notes so good that Britain went 38 years without a £50.

Prisoners in Sachsenhausen were forced to forge pound notes so well that the Bank of England withdrew every note above £5