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Films

The Counterfeiters

Thomas Wartenberg finds that extreme circumstances can bring out a person’s true moral character.

Stefan Ruzowitzy’s Academy Award-winning The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) focuses on a group of Jewish concentration camp inmates during the Second World War. It fictionalizes the true story of an attempt by the Nazis to counterfeit British pounds and American dollars. Apparently, the Nazis thought that if they could flood the Allies’ economies with millions in counterfeit notes, those economies would flounder, allowing the Nazis an easy victory. With their typical racist logic, the Nazis assumed that the ‘tricky’ Jews were up to the task of such forgery, so they gathered together a group of prisoners who had experience in printing, etching, etc. They were given special privileges – so long as they cooperated and worked hard to reach the Nazi’s goals.

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