Counterfeiter
How a Norwegian Jew Survived the Holocaust
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This is an enthralling personal account of the secret Nazi project, Operation Bernhard, devised to destabilize the British and, later, American economies by creating and putting into circulation millions of counterfeit banknotes. A team of typographers and printers was pulled out of the rows of prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and transferred to the strictly isolated Block 19 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There they were presented with the enormous task of producing almost perfect counterfeits to the value of hundreds of millions of pounds sterling. These notes were to be dropped from bombers over London, with the aim of causing financial chaos. When the time came the Luftwaffe's resources were fully committed in other campaigns and theaters but some of the currency was successfully used to fund operations in Germany's secret war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of just a few accounts from prisoners who worked for the Nazi's Operation Bernhard, this grim account of imprisonment and survival by the late Nachstern (1902-1969), in English for the first time, takes readers inside Hitler's plan to bring down the British and American economies. In 1942, Nachtstern was arrested by the Nazis and, along with more than 500 others, deported to Germany and imprisoned at Auschwitz. A stroke of luck rescues him from the gas chambers, sending him to work as a typographer at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, producing fake British money that the Nazis hoped to use to destroy the UK economy. Nachstern's prose is measured but vivid, his loneliness a steady beat against which his struggle unfolds. Two essays put the man and his memoir in perspective, and an emotional foreword by Nachstern's daughter recalls a man so haunted, he would wake sobbing and screaming. Arresting from start to finish, this harrowing memoir is full of compassion, pain and strength that illuminates from the inside a little-known episode in the Nazi effort. B&w photos.
