Talk:The Counterfeiters (2007 film)

Accurancy of film?
Question: How accurate is this film in regard to actual events that transpired? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.132.86.130 (talk) 02:22, 17 June 2008 (UTC)


 * This film advertises itself as "based on a true story." While it is true that 142 Jewish prisoners were immured in a special barracks at Sachsenhausen and counterfeited notes with a face value of 134 million pounds under the supervision of the SS with the initial aim of dropping those notes on wartime Britain, the resemblance to historical events stops there.
 * The dramatic and moral spine of the film's story is a running debate inside the barracks about whether to cooperate with the Nazi plot or sabotage it. The debate supposedly took place between a young Communist idealist based on a prisoner named Adolf Burger and a master counterfeiter based on Solomon Smolianoff. The prisoners are also shown feeling guilty that they were being well treated while the slave laborers in the camp were being worked to death or killed. There is no [repeat no] evidence in any memoir including Burger's own, nor in any of the voluminous after-action interviews by Scotland Yard's anti-counterfeit squad and members of the U.S. Secret Service that any such debate ever took place. When Burger was asked about this after the film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007, he replied to the correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz: "Bullshit. The important thing was to survive. We didn't care about the others in the camp." (Ha'aretz Feb. 14, 2007 www.haaretz.com.hasen/pages/825099.html) Nor is there any evidence that such fictitious disputes could have boiled over into the physical violence depicted in the film; malingering of any sort was immediately stopped and severely punished by the guards. Moreover, Smolianoff never worked on pound notes,only dollars (see his postwar interrogation posted on www.lawrencemalkin.com ) He arrived at the camp in the autumn of 1944; Burger several months before that. The operation had already been underway for two years, and there is no record of the prisoners entertaining serious moral objections to participating in the operation. Their principal goal was to perform well in order to stay alive.
 * It is also false that Maj. Krueger ("Herzog" in the film) was a member of the pre-war counterfeit squad in Berlin; he was a communications and forgery specialist and had never met Smolianoff until the latter arrived at Sachsenhausen. Toward the very end -- late in 1944 and early in 1945 -- Smolianoff and a Dutch reserve army captain, Avraham Jacobson, a printer in civilian life, slowed down the dollar counterfeiting operation, possibly with Maj. Krueger's tacit support, so they could all survive the war. Some prisoners persuaded them to do a more efficient job lest they all be slaughtered in reprisal. See Smolianoff's interrogation and "Counterfeiter" by Moritz Nachstern; Osprey Press, Oxford, 2008 [Nachstern was another counterfeiter; he wrote his memoirs when his memory was fresh, unlike Burger, who waited almost forty years and appears to have drawn on material made available by the Czech secret services. Many of the pictures and some of the material first appeared in Der Banditzenschatz, by Julius Mader, published in the German Democratic Republic in 1966 under the auspices of the Stasi, in whose headquarters Mader worked.]
 * The prisoners were not freed by the Russians. They were taken to a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria deep in the Alps and were to be murdered by their SS guards but managed to delay their execution until the guards fled upon hearing of Hitler's death and just before the arrival of U.S. Army tanks. Major Krueger also escaped, but not before visiting his soon-to-be-freed prisoners, wishing them luck, and commiserating with Smolianoff that they had not managed to print any dollars successfully because paper was not available [also recounted by Nachtstern.] While the picture is bracketed by an account of by a visit to Monte Carlo's gambling tables by Smolianoff (which appears to have taken place), it ignores a far greater irony: that bundles of false pound notes were given to members of the Jewish underground in postwar Italy by a Jewish money-launderer, Jaac van Harten (real name Jaacov Levy) and these false Nazi notes paid for equipment such as engines and small arms that was shipped to Palestine for use by the nascent Jewish army.
 * The Wikipedia entry, presumably meaning to imply it as evidence of authenticity, reports that Burger worked closely with the film's director. That may be, but according to the Financial Times of London Oct. 5, 2007: "Adolf Burger makes for an unlikely figure on the film festival PR [public relations] circuit, his honesty about the gap between history and the film bringing a sobering reality to the process. Every time he's quizzed about the use of dramatic licence he replies: 'It's just a movie.'"

Lawrence Malkin Author of "Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19." [translated from English into six languages including German.] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.246.185.178 (talk) 00:22, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Accuaracy of article on final scene?
The present article has the woman in Monte Carlo comforting him that it was only money that he had lost. I thought to the contrary that she was saying that it was "so much money" that he had lost, but my German is not fluent. Nandt1 (talk) 03:42, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * From what I remember, the english subtitles agree with you, at least, on the DVD I watched they did. I'm going to edit this to relfect that, but I'll add a citation needed thingy to it. James.Denholm&reg;Talk to me... 09:48, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

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