Operation Bernhard - in Fiction

In Fiction

A fictionalized version of the Operation Bernhard story was the topic of a comedy drama serial, Private Schulz, starring Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson, produced by the BBC in 1980.

It also forms part of the backstory for the forger in the 1972 Frederick Forsyth novel, The Odessa File.

The 2007 Oscar-winning Austrian film, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), tells the story of Salomon Sorowitsch, loosely based on the lives of counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff, and of Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak book printer who was put to work on Operation Bernhard in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and whose memoirs were turned into the screenplay.

In the movie 5 Fingers, based upon the life of the German spy Cicero, the final plot turn is the revelation that the British currency is counterfeit.

In the British comedy series "Goodnight Sweetheart" starring Nicholas Lyndhurst, the episode entitled "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie". Operation Bernhard was used as a way for the main characters to catch a Nazi spy who was passing off forged notes in local pubs and shops in London.

The 1941-published novel Traitor's Purse (US title The Sabotage Murder Mystery) by Margery Allingham featured (presumably by coincidence) a very similar plot wherein, to lend them verisimilitude, the forged notes were to be posted to every household in Britain in parallel with a secretly-planned genuine Government mailing.

Dov Landau, one of the leading characters of Leon Uris bestselling novel "Exodus", was a jewish teenager who saved his life by showing his counterfeiting skills during selection in Auschwitz.

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