The Devil's Workshop

Adolf Burger was a printer in Bratislava, who forged baptismal certificates for fellow Jews to avoid Nazi persecution. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz. He was moved to Birkenau, where he was selected along with about 140 other prisoners to make counterfeit pound notes in a Nazi plan to undermine Britain's economy. The operation took place in Block 19 at Sachsenhausen, where the presses ran almost nonstop. The prisoners printed pounds, British postage stamps, and passports. An estimated 130 million counterfeit British pounds were produced at Sachsenhausen.

The Nazis also wanted the prisoners to forge American dollars to destabilize the United States economy, but the scheme did not advance far when the Nazis moved Operation Bernhard to the Mauthausen camp in Austria. The Allied troops liberated the camp in early May 1945. Burger appeared in the documentary Taking the Stand: We Have More to Say. He also wrote a memoir entitled The Devil's Workshop, which was adapted into the film The Counterfeiters. It won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film of 2007. He died on December 6, 2016 at the age of 99.

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