Krueger's Men

August 21, 2006
Former Time
correspondent Malkin tells a remarkable, little-known story from WWII: the Nazis' use of concentration camp prisoners to produce counterfeit British (and later American) currency and dump it to sabotage the Allied economies. Some readers might find Malkin's setup a bit slow, but the main events, deeply researched and tautly narrated, form a tale of opportunism made for a movie. The Nazis realized the labor could be drawn from concentration camps, and the prisoners realized that volunteering for the effort could save their lives. At the height of the operation, headed by SS officer Bernhard Krueger, the Jewish prisoners produced 650,000 notes a month. The counterfeiting helped finance some Nazi spy efforts, as well as other parts of the Reich's war machine, but it failed to bring down the Allies. As gripping as the tale of Operation Bernhard is, the story of how the Jewish counterfeit brigade—most of them prisoners at Sachsenhausen—survived the waning days of the war is even more so. 8 pages of b&w photos, 2 maps.

October 1, 2006
In 1939, two weeks after the onset of World War II, the germination of a counterfeiting plan was launched in Berlin. The goal was to cause chaos in the British economy by spreading millions of phony banknotes across Britain. Such plans were hardly unique in wartime; they were rarely effective, and never a major factor in determining victory or defeat. This plan would be no exception. What made the plan worthy of attention was the fact that the men relocated to perform the actual counterfeiting were pulled out of concentration camps (including death camps) and gathered at the "work camps" of Sachenhausen. Eventually, 140 prisoners from 15 different nations worked under the command of S.S. Officer Bernhard Krueger. Krueger was no monster; rather, he was a typical careerist who treated the prisoners humanely as a practical manner. Still, conditions at Sachenhausen were harsh, especially when Krueger's men ran afoul of a pair of sadistic guards. Malkin, a journalist and foreign correspondent, has written an engrossing and often inspiring chronicle of an obscure episode of the war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)