Operation Bernhard Memoirs
Burger's manuscripts were written in a mixture of Czech and Slovak, and adjusted by editors for publication in standard Czech. Versions of his memoirs were reedited and republished several times in a variety of languages (including German, Hungarian, Persian, and Slovak) and under modified titles.
His experiences as a currency counterfeiter working on a secret Nazi project in a German concentration camp were first made public in 1945 under the title Number 64401 Speaks (Číslo 64401 mluví) written by Sylva and Oskar Krejčí, who based their book on Burger's narrated recollections and included the photographs of the former prisoners he was able to take immediately after liberation. Adolf Burger began to rewrite his memoirs himself in the 1970s. He explained his motivation in an interview:
When I was liberated by the Americans I went home very calmly, never had a bad dream For years I was silent, I didn't want to speak about this any more. It was only when the neo-Nazis started with their lies about Auschwitz that I began .
His memoirs were published in 1983 as The Commando of Counterfeiters (simultaneously in Czech Komando padělatelů and in a Slovak translation Komando falšovateľov), which was translated and published in East Germany in the same year under the now-familiar title The Devil's Workshop (Des Teufels Werkstatt: Im Fälscherkommando des KZ Sachsenhausen). The English language edition of the book was published by Frontline Books (London) in February 2009. Adolf Burger visited London to launch the book, with events at East Finchley's Phoenix Cinema and Jewish Book Week. He visited the Bank of England on Tuesday 24 February and met the Chief Cashier, Andrew Bailey. He was given a tour of the bank and the museum and presented with one of the notes which he had forged in the concentration camp more than sixty years earlier.
Screenwriter and director Stefan Ruzowitzky adapted the book as the screenplay for his Austrian-German co-production The Counterfeiters that received a foreign-language Oscar in 2008. Burger checked every draft of the screenplay. Adolf Burger is played by the German actor August Diehl. He is one of only two prisoner characters in the film that has an authentic historical name and is not synthesized from several real-life prisoners involved in Operation Bernhard (the other is the opera singer, Isaak Plappler who also was still living when the film was made - see director's commentary on the DVD).
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