CASSELL MILITARY TRADE BOOKS
1 total work
Solomon Smolianoff, a professional Jewish forger, was wanted by several European police forces prior to the outbreak of World War Two. Interned in a concentration camp, his forgery skills were to save his life after he was selected to lead a Nazi forgery unit. The Germans had a plan Operation Bernhard to swamp London with counterfeit pound notes and reduce the country's economy to chaos. Smolianoff's challenge was to make sufficient progress on the counterfeiting to keep the Germans happy, while ensuring that he and his team never quite completed the task: completion meant death. In this powerful and engaging story Smolianoff comes across as a Schindler like character for whom war served to bring out his better qualities. The authors go on to tell what became of the counterfeited money after World War Two: some of it went to South America with the fleeing Gestapo, some to Palestine with the emigrating Israelis, and much of it still lies at the bottom of a lake in Austria.