The Devil's Workshop

One of the most remarkable episodes of the Second World War was the German attempt to forge currency and trigger the economic collapse of the Allies. The counterfeit operation was one of the largest the world has ever seen and lead to the post-war reissue of sterling.

At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, Jewish prisoners of 13 different nationalities were forced to work on producing counterfeit pound and dollar notes worth billions. The plan was known as Operation Bernhard.

The forgeries that were produced were virtually undetectable. Only the most senior forgers were able to spot the fakes – even staff at the Bank of England failed to do so.

In this extraordinary memoir, the sole surviving Czech counterfeiter, Adolf Burger, describes his wartime experiences. He recounts the harrowing facts surrounding the murder of his wife Gizela in Auschwitz, as well as his own time as a prisoner in four concentration camps. He was working as a counterfeiter until his liberation from a concentration camp at Ebensee on 5 May 1945.

Supported by hitherto unseen documentation and photographs that Burger took of his fellow prisoners after the war, this is a shocking account which sheds fresh light on the calculated barbarity of the Nazi war machine.

Adolf Burger was born in Slovakia in 1917. He was arrested in August 1942 together with his wife and both were sent to Auschwitz. Burger was transferred to the forgery workshop at Sachsenhausen in Berlin in 1944. He is one of the last surviving witnesses of the Nazi counterfeiting operation and was a consultant for the film The Counterfeiters, winner of the 2008 Foreign Language Oscar. His memoir 'The Devil's Workshop' has been published in Hungarian, Persian, Japanese and Czech. He continues to travel to speak about his wartime experiences. He lives in Prague.