By Adrian Ash: DURING the Second World War, Nazi Germany hatched a plot to flood Britain with fake bank notes.Working first at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp just north of Berlin, some 140 Jewish printers and forgers made perhaps £132 million in high-quality fakes (some US$650m at the wartime exchange rate, but nearer $6bn today), equal to around 15% of Great Britain's then paper-money supply.
Named after the SS engineer who ran the operation, Operation Bernhard only saw a handful of its counterfeit fivers and tenners reach England. (The Bank of England apparently burnt what it found, along with its records.) Because, "by 1943, the Luftwaffe was almost kaput," writes historian Lawrence Malkin, and so "instead of pursuing their original goal of dropping the counterfeits on England to cast suspicion on real Pound notes, the SS used the fakes to finance its own espionage service."
The Nazis' slave-fake money thus flooded the black markets of Central Europe and North Africa, driving down the street value of Sterling (and spooking the hell out of the Bank of England, which couldn't detect those forgeries which found their way to London). Eventually, through a bizarre twist of fate (and the canny money-launderers of the Jewish underground), it helped fund the post-war flight to Palestine of Holocaust survivors.....read on
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