The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is an Austrian-German film by Stefan Ruzowitzky whose story is inspired by Operation Bernhard, a secret Nazi operation during the Second World War to print and flood Britain with counterfeit pounds. The film centres on the counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch and the printer Burger who are forced to make the forgeries for the Germans in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The story is based on the autobiographical book of Adolf Burger, a deported Slovak Jew and printer by trade who was involved in this operation.
Berlin 1936: Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, an exceptional forger, is arrested and sent to a concentration camp. In 1942, he is released from Mauthausen and sent to supervise a team of printers, illustrators, bankers and typographers, all Jewish, in the Sachsenhausen camp to make counterfeit banknotes (pounds sterling and dollars). The group was torn between collaborating and saving their own lives or sabotaging the Nazi operation.
