NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Operation Bernhard

Operation Bernhard was the name of a secret German plan devised during the Second World War to destabilise the British economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes. Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ... Headquarters London Governor Mervyn King Central Bank of United Kingdom Currency Pound Sterling ISO 4217 Code GBP Base borrowing rate 5. ...

A fully researched account,based on declassified archives inLondon, Washington, and elsewhere, was published in 2006 as "Krueger's Men" by Lawrence Malkin. A fictitious version of the Operation Bernhard story was the topic of a comedy drama serial called Private Schulz (starring Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson) produced by the BBC in 1980. A BBC Television comedy drama starring Michael Elphick in the title role and Ian Richardson playing various parts. ... Michael as Harry Slater in EastEnders Michael Elphick (born September 19, 1946 in Chichester, West Sussex; died September 7, 2002 in London) was a British actor. ... Ian William Richardson CBE (April 7, 1934 â€“ February 9, 2007) was a Scottish actor best known for playing the Machiavellian politician Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards trilogy for the BBC. // Richardson was born in Edinburgh and educated at Tynecastle High School in the city and trained at the... The British Broadcasting Corporation, usually known as the BBC (and also informally known as the Beeb or Auntie) is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world in terms of audience numbers, employing 26,000 staff in the United Kingdom alone and with a budget of more than GBÂ£4 billion...

The real plan was directed by, and named after, SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Bernhard Krüger, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from among inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp at first, and then from others especially Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, the work of engraving the complex printing plates, developing the appropriate rag-based paper with the correct watermarks, and breaking the code to generate valid serial numbers was extremely difficult, but by the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press there had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being extremely difficult although not impossible to distinguish from the real thing. Bernhard KrÃ¼ger (IPA /bÎµrnhart kry:gÉ™r/) (born 26 November 1904; died [unknown]) was during World War II as an SS SturmbannfÃ¼hrer, the leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. ... Arbeit Macht Frei gate Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp in Germany, operating between 1936 and 1950. ...

Although the initial plan was to destabilise the British economy by dropping the notes from aircraft, on the assumption that while some honest people would hand them in most people would keep the notes, in practice this plan was not put into effect. The Luftwaffe did not have enough planes to deliver the forgeries, and by that time the operation was in the hands of SS foreign intelligebce. Instead, from late 1943 approximately one million notes per month were printed, and many were transferred from SS headqurtars to a former hotel near Merano in Trentino-South Tyrol, northern Italy, from where it was laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and to pay German agents. It has been reported that counterfeit currency was used to finance the rescue of the arrested former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943 but there is no evidence to confirm this. The Bank of England first learned of a plot from a spy as early as 1939. It first detected the existence of the notes in 1943, and declared them "the most dangerous ever seen." Clerks first recorded the counterfeits from a a British bank in Tangiers. They were recorded, like all nites, in handwritten ledgers still in the Bank's archives (every banknote issued by the Bank of England as late as the 1940s was recorded in large leather-bound ledgers, as the notes were a liability of the bank) noted that one of the notes had already been recorded as having been paid off. Image File history File links Forgednote. ... Image File history File links Forgednote. ... Merano (Italian: Merano, Ladin: Meran, German: Meran; Note that many of the Italian dialects and Rhaeto-Romance languages in the area use Meran), is a city in the Trentino-South Tyrol region of Italy. ... Trentino-South Tyrol (Italian: Trentino-Alto Adige, German and Ladin: Trentino-SÃ¼dtirol, official: Trentino-Alto Adige/SÃ¼dtirol) is an autonomous Region in Northern Italy. ... Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (July 29, 1883 â€“ April 28, 1945) was the prime minister and dictator of Italy from 1922 until 1943, when he was overthrown. ... Headquarters London Governor Mervyn King Central Bank of United Kingdom Currency Pound Sterling ISO 4217 Code GBP Base borrowing rate 5. ...

Following the evacuation of Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiting team was transferred to Redl-Zipf in Austria, a sub-camp of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At the beginning of May 1945 the team was ordered to be transferred to the Ebensee sub-camp, where they were all to be killed together; however their SS guards had only one truck to convey their prisoners, so it was necessary for the truck to make three trips. On the third trip the truck broke down, and the last batch of prisoners had to be marched to Ebensee, where they arrived on 4 May. The guards of the first two batches of prisoners fled when the prisoners at Ebensee camp revolted and refused to be be moved into tunnels, where they presumably were to have been blown up. The delayed arrival of the third batch therefore saved the lives if all. Then the American army arrived, and the prisoners dispersed among the other sixteen thousand prisoners in the camp. Thus, because of the order that the prisoners all be killed together, none were actually killed. They were liberated from Ebensee by US forces on 5 May 1945. It is believed that most of the notes produced ended up at the bottom of Lake Toplitz, near Ebensee, from where they were recovered by divers in 1959, but examples continued to turn up in circulation in Britain for many years, which caused the Bank of England to withdraw all notes larger than £5 from circulation, and not reintroduce the denominations until the early 1960s (£10), 1970 (£20), or 1980 (£50). Image:Mutilation skarskarrskano. ... May 4 is the 124th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (125th in leap years). ... Ebensee lies in Upper Austria near Langbathbach and river Traun. ... May 5 is the 125th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (126th in leap years). ... 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday. ... Lake Toplitz is a lake situated in in a dense mountain forest high up in the Austrian Alps, 60 miles from Salzburg city in western Austria. ...

The counterfeiting team also turned its attention to US currency, producing samples of one side of the $100 bills on 22 February 1945 with full production scheduled to start the next day, but the Reich Security Main Office ordered the work halted and the press dismantled. ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Indian Ocean Territory[1], the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 2. ... February 22 is the 53rd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday. ...

German spy Elyesa Bazna (codename "Cicero") was paid with counterfeit notes, and unsuccessfully sued the German government after the war for outstanding pay. Elyesa Bazna (1904 in Kosovo - December 21, 1970 in Munich) was a spy employed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. ...

After the war, Major Krüger was detained by the English for two years, then turned over to the French for a year. He said they asked him to forge documents but that he refused. He was released in 1948 without any charges being pressed. In the 1950s he went before a De-Nazification Court, where statements were produced from the forger-inmates that he had been responsible for saving their lives. He later worked for the company which had produced the special paper for the Operation Bernhard forgeries. He died in 1989.

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