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At first glance, the stamp looks perfectly normal.
Only on closer inspection do minimal, but explosive details reveal themselves.
Because the stamp shows the likeness of King George VI.
But unlike the British original, this copy features a Star of David over the crown - instead of the cross.
In addition, the “P” for pence has been replaced in the value indication under the portrait.
Instead, a sickle and a hammer can be seen here.
The stamps offered as a complete set by the Berlin antiquarian bookshop Lorych are forgeries.
But they weren't made for criminal, i.e. monetary, reasons.
Rather, they are historically significant: they are falsifications that were printed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin during the Second World War.
The differences between the original (left) and the forgery are only noticeable on closer inspection
Source: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain;
Lorych second-hand bookshop
They are by no means unique;
on the contrary: They come from a series of forgeries that arose as part of the “Bernhard Action”.
This company was named after the SS-Sturmbandführer Bernhard Krüger (1904–1989).
From 1942 onwards, on Heinrich Himmler's instructions, he had banknotes, postage stamps and official documents of the enemy powers forged on a large scale, mainly based on British models.
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The most important goal was to spread the counterfeit money en masse in Great Britain at some point and thus trigger a strong currency devaluation.
This was intended to destabilize the economy.
Additional rumors spread among the people and the resulting fear of counterfeit money could then have brought payment transactions to a standstill.
The workshop was rebuilt for the filming of the movie “The Counterfeiters”
Source: picture-alliance / dpa / dpaweb
The plan was kept top secret.
The same was true of the production process: the counterfeit money was created in blocks 18 and 19, which were completely shielded from the rest of the concentration camp. Up to 144 Jewish inmates, mainly trained engravers, typesetters and related professions, had to imitate the plates for the banknotes and use it to produce large quantities on suitable paper.
Krüger and his helpers distinguished four quality levels from the SS.
The most successful forgeries were artificially aged in order to make them appear even more believable, and then given out to diplomats and business people abroad, who were supposed to use them to buy raw materials and real currency that were essential to the war effort.
Even the Bank of England recognized these notes;
even after 1945, experts often had difficulty distinguishing these forgeries from the originals.
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Slightly less good notes were used, for example, to “pay” German spies in neutral countries.
For example, the Catalan Joan Pujol García in Portugal, who was a double agent in the service of the British secret service MI5 and was called "Garbo".
Flowers with minor defects were stored separately in order to simply drop them from aircraft in large numbers over Great Britain after the start of the planned operation.
That should start the open attack on the UK economy.
The worst prints were destroyed.
When making the selection, the SS relied on the expertise of Adolf Burger, among others.
The trained printer was arrested in 1942 and sent to various concentration camps one after the other.
Two years later he came to Sachsenhausen, to barracks 18 and 19. He lived with his comrades isolated from the rest of the concentration camp.
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The concentration camp staff treated the forgers better than the prisoners in the “normal” barracks: they were allowed to move relatively freely within the cordoned off area and let their hair grow;
they also got a little more food.
But the total shielding also meant: If one of them got sick, he could not be moved to the sick barracks, which were already poorly equipped.
That would have endangered the secrecy of the action.
So anyone who did not get well was shot by the SS.
Adolf Burger (1917-2016) survived the time in the concentration camp and the forgery workshop and reported to the Allies about Operation Bernhard
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
In total, British banknotes with a face value of more than 130 million pounds sterling were printed alongside other currencies in smaller quantities - divided into notes with the values 5, 10, 20 and 50 pounds.
This makes the operation the largest counterfeiting campaign in history to this day.
In the end, the flowers weren't used as planned.
This was also due to the courage of the captured forgers: some of them cleverly delayed production.
Nevertheless, the SS used the counterfeit money to finance the war, among other things.
Most of the flowers, however, were never used.
The counterfeit postage stamps in barracks 18 and 19 served a different purpose: propaganda.
As a first motif, the counterfeiters took half-pence stamps, which had come out on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of King George V's crown in 1935.
In the German imitation, the monarch's head was replaced by the face of Joseph Stalin;
the design was the responsibility of Leo Haas, artist and concentration camp inmate.
Then came the stamps with the portrait of Georges VI.
in several values, but with a Star of David and a hammer and sickle.
You should mock British society.
A complete, well-preserved set of forgeries such as the one offered by the Berlin antiquarian bookshop is rare.
To cover up the action, the Nazis sank the counterfeit money in Lake Toplitz;
In 1959 divers searched for it for the first time and recovered part of the flowers
Source: Getty Images
Because of the rapid advance of the Red Army in early 1945, the forgery workshop was relocated from Sachsenhausen to the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz.
Shortly before the end of the war, SS men tried to cover up the action.
To do this, they sank masses of flowers and equipment in the Austrian Toplitzsee.
The counterfeiters were also supposed to be murdered, but this did not happen: In May 1945, American troops liberated the camp in Upper Austria and rescued those who survived the "Operation Bernhard".
It was through their statements that the Allies became aware of the operation.
The granddaughter of Hitler's counterfeiter
Charlotte Krüger met a survivor of the counterfeiting workshop.
In the video he reports on his encounter with Bernhard Krüger, Adolf Hitler's counterfeiter.
Source: WeltN24
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The Bank of England reacted radically: all pound notes in circulation were withdrawn and new notes issued, although this meant destroying innumerable real notes for free.
In 2003 the bank admitted that the action could indeed have caused great damage and even threatened the international financial system of the time.
Nevertheless: Counterfeiting of money was not considered a war crime - so Krüger escaped a greater punishment.
As a member of the SS, he sat in “automatic arrest” for four years, went through denazification and later worked for the Hahnemühle paper mill, which had supplied him with the material for the forgery campaign during the war.
Adolf Burger processed his experiences in a biography;
his book was made into a film by Stefan Ruzowitzky under the name "Die Fälscher" and won the 2007 Oscar for best foreign film.
Burger died in 2016 at the age of 99.
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