Talk:Operation Bernhard

Margery Allingham
In terms of 'Legacy', it might be worth mentioning that the plot of Margery Allingham's classic crime novel Traitor's Purse (1941), set in August 1940, hinges on an enemy plan to flood Britain with near-perfect forged banknotes, to cause chaotic inflation and bring down the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitor%27s_Purse The book has remained in print ever since. Allingham outlines the genius of the scheme, which is that, if the forgeries are passed in sufficient numbers, the government will have no choice but to accept them as legal tender. She also outlines the drawback (which in reality defeated the Germans), which is the difficulty of getting the public to accept and spend the forgeries in the necessary numbers. In the novel, fifth-columnists take advantage of a large war-loan bond issue, whose prospectus is to be mailed to all taxpayers (half the adult population) on 15 August, so that the GPO has been warned to expect a huge rush of official mail. Vast quantities of the forged notes (imported in wine cases just before the war and securely stored by a collaborator), £4 to £9 at a time, have been inserted into bogus official OHMS envelopes, addressed to poorer non-taxpayers and benefit claimants, the people most likely to accept such an official windfall, with bogus letters from the Ministry of Labour explaining in official gobbledegook why the money has been awarded. Three hundred trucks are on hand to deliver the letters and banknotes to main railway stations along with the real war-loan mailshots. The scheme fails only at the last minute because of the hero's intervention. Of course the Germans never had such a fifth-column organisation in Britain, and Allingham knew nothing about Operation Bernhard till after the war and was surprised to hear of it. But it is notable that an imaginative writer saw the catastrophic possibilities of the scheme (and saw its difficulties better than the enemy seems to have done). Khamba Tendal (talk) 17:59, 19 August 2023 (UTC)