Many years ago, I read of a plan that the Germans had, to disrupt the British economy.
The plan was to print billions of pounds worth of counterfeit British banknotes, and drop them on England. The idea was that the currency would set off a roaring inflation, and lead to an economic collapse.
The key to printing acceptable banknotes, was to learn the algorithm that the Bank of England used to generate the serial numbers on the bills. This was solved by employing a mathematician (expert in number theory).
There was a PBS/Masterpiece Theatre series on this (in the 1980s)-I think it was called “The Secret War of Private Schultz”.
My question: did the Germans actually duplicate the correct serial numbers? And, (after the war), when the phoney banknotes turned up, were they accepted?
Article I saw the other day said that at some point x% (I’ll need to find the article, but x was not small) of British notes in circulation were German fakes.
Another note – didn’t the Germans use Jewish master printers/engravers whom they’d rounded up for the camps to do the fine detail work?
I think you would be interested in the movie based on this story. It is outstanding.
I believe you are referring to Operation Bernhard. If you like reading, try “Counterfeiter: How a Norwegian Jew survived the Holocaust”. If you perfer movies, try “Die Fälscher.”
Operation Bernhard is what you’re thinking of. There was a tv series in the eighties and an Austrian film in 2007 both based on the story.
Seems like the federal reserve is doing that very thing to the US dollar !?!?!
The US Federal Reserve is counterfeiting the US dollar?!?!?
Moderator Note
C2urio, political commentary of this kind is out of place in General Questions. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
1 of the real-life characters in *Die Falscher *wrote a gr8 book too: Adolf Burger, The Devil’s Workshop. Fascinating. Not only currency, but id cards, passes, forms: the infamous ‘pay-puzz’ the Germans always ask for in the movies. the Pound was only the beginning - they succeeded in copying the dollar, considered indistinguishable from the real thing as much as the pound. Relative economies compared, a flood of fake $US arguably would’ve caused more damage than the pound. Burger describes how they delayed. 1 intaglio press is located in Tehran; it’s suspected they & the North Koreans are funneling supernotes into circulation as economic warfare.
The story I read was that a great majority of the counterfeits were collected and turned in by civic-minded Brits after the drops. Not sure how true that is, it sounds like patriotic puffery - but then back then 5 pounds was a lot of money, probably like $100 today. If you found several blowing past your house, dozens blowing down High Street after the last bombing raid, I’m sure it did not take long for everyone to figure out what was going on and of course, immediately become suspicious of anyone trying to pass a 5-pound note.
You may be interested in a 1987 book Nazi Counterfeiting of British Currency in World War II by Bryan Burke (ISBN 0-9618274-0-8), Franklin Press. It’s a well-researched study of how the camps worked, the details of the differences in the counterfeits, and stories of what happened to caches discovered since the war. I have copy 45/1000, and copies are available from Amazon sellers, ranging in price from $185 to $350.
As far as your first question goes, on page 21 he writes:
The Nazis had to learn the enigma of the system of the numbering routine. The researcher learned that there was a possibility of 350 different numbering combinations. Exactly how the investigators learned to duplicate the numbering is not known…
and then continues that the RSHA (Reich Security) or an informant were possible choices, and that system was solved in 1986 by two British money collectors, so it’s very likely the numbers were accurate.
More interesting to me is the comparison of engravings of the original and counterfeit notes. It’s useful to have examples of each to compare them side by side; they are available at about $100.
One thing I remember, I don’t know from where, was that one of the ways they could spot the fake pounds was that the counterfeiters, in their zeal for perfection actually “corrected” some imperfections in the real notes.
I’ve read that this counterfeiting actually hurt the German war effort in at least one way. German intelligence sent spies into neutral and British-controlled territories and these spies needed money to operate. So the Germans decided to kill two birds with one stone and gave their spies the counterfeit British money for their funding - they figured they could fund their spies cheaply and the spread of the counterfeit money would undermine the British economy.
The problem was that the British had figured out what the Germans were doing and were able to spot the counterfeits. When a bunch of counterfeit money began appearing they would backtrack it to its source and often be able to identify a German spy this way.