Bidspirit auction | Counterfeit English 5 Pound Banknote

Counterfeit English 5 Pound Banknote Printed at Sachsenhausen - This English 5 pound banknote is in used condition and was printed prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. On May 8, 1941, Operation Bernard began under the command of SS officer Bernhard Krüger. In barracks 17 and 18 of Sachsenhausen, printers, counterfeiters and bankers were gathered to counterfeit the English pound to create inflation in England. Making the banknote turned out to be a lot trickier than expected after all because it was made of linen and contained several security features. Eventually, through a spy, the money ended up at the ”Bank of England” and there it was labeled as real money. Just before the end of World War Il in Europe, the money was put in wooden boxes and dumped by the SS in Lake Toplitz in Austria. Decades later, they saw some banknotes floating in the lake and launched a diving operation where some of the counterfeit money was found. In 2007, the film The Counterfeits – Die Falscher was released Operation Bernhard was a Nazi state-sponsored counterfeiting scheme run by the SS Reich Security Main Office, using Jewish prisoners with expertise in printing, engraving, and finance selected from various concentration camps and concentrated in a special barracks at Sachsenhausen. Under Bernhard Krüger's direction, the unit produced forged British pound notes of remarkable quality intended to destabilise the British economy and finance German intelligence operations abroad, with some plans extending to forging US dollars. As Allied forces closed in during 1945, equipment, printing plates, and remaining stocks of notes were dumped into Lake Toplitz and the Enns River in Austria, where quantities of the forged currency were recovered by divers in subsequent decades. The scheme, and the coerced prisoners who carried it out, later formed the basis of the Academy Award-winning film ”The Counterfeiters” (2007).