The film turns to Adolf Burger's memoir The Devil's Workshop as its basis. Burger was a Slovakian Jew arrested in 1942 for forging birth certificates and documents. The reason for his arrest would prove to be what saved Burger's life. After his arrest, Burger was recruited into a covert Nazi operation run by SS Major Bernhard Kruger. The purpose of this Operation Bernhard was to counterfeit large amounts of English pounds and U.S. dollars, and then flood their markets with the fake bills and hopefully cause their economies to crash. To run this operation, the Nazis took Jewish printers, graphic artists, typesetters, typographers, and counterfeiters from concentration camps and relocated them to the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin. There they assembled a team of about 140 men led by an infamously talented Russian-Jewish counterfeiter named Salomon Smolianoff. So long as these men worked on creating the fake banknotes, they were given better treatment than the other prisoners in the concentration camp.
Burger waited some thirty years before recounting his story in a book. His book then caught the eye of Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky. Prior to The Counterfeiters, Ruzowitzky had directed a self-described "Alpine western" ( The Inheritors ); pair of German horror films ( Anatomy 1 and 2 ); and an odd World War II film about cross dressing British spies ( All the Queen's Men) . That odd assortment of work wouldn't lead one to expect a film like The Counterfeiters but it seemed a natural choice for Ruzowitzky. In an interview with Cineaste , the director said: "Being Austrian and having grandparents who were-some more, some less-dedicated followers of the Nazi party, and living in a country where politicians still get away with saying incredible things about the Nazi era, I always felt that sooner or later in my career I should make a statement. So when I first heard about the story I thought that this could be the right story for me. The pitch was a counterfeiter in a concentration camp."
Augusr Diehl as Adolf Burger and Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch. (Sony Pictures)
In the film, Burger is not really the main character but rather the one suggesting that the group sabotage the Nazi's operation by not delivering the forged banknotes. The central character of the film is one based more on Salomon Smolianoff, who becomes Salomon Sorowitsch in the film and is played by Karl Markovics. Ruzowitzky opens his film at a ritzy casino after the war. An elegantly tuxedoed Sorowitsch is turning his small pile of chips into a large pile at the gambling tables. He picks up a beautiful woman and heads back to his hotel. Through all of this he does not speak but we do glimpse a tattoo from a concentration camp on his arm.
Then the film cuts back to Berlin, 1936. Sorowitsch is living the high life and not paying much attention to the Nazis or what's happening to Jews around him. When asked why he's not concerned about what's happening "to our people," Sorowitsch simply says, "I'm me and they are others." But Sorowitsch gets arrested for counterfeiting and ends up in a concentration camp. Sorowitsch, like Giancarlo Giannini's character in Seven Beauties , is a survivor. He will do essentially anything to survive and he's clever enough to figure out what that needs to be. At first he manages to paint portraits of the German officers to secure better treatment. Then he is recruited to run Operation Bernhard. This results in unexpected conflicts for him. He's willing to participate because he wants to survive but he wants to excel at the work because it's his craft and he can't let anyone - even the Nazis - think that any counterfeiting task is beyond his capabilities. And he does the work knowing that he is helping the enemy.
Making a film about the Holocaust but using a very specific and personal story is what makes The Counterfeiters stand out. It's the specifics of Sorowitsch's story that rivet us. His obsession with getting the job done and done well reminds me of Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai . Both these men are given assignments by their enemies - Sorowitsch to counterfeit money for the Nazis, Guinness to build a bridge for the Japanese - and become so caught up in perfecting the details of their assignments that they lose sight of the bigger picture. They help their enemies because of their own obsession with perfection. The portrait of Sorowitsch and the tight, insular performance of Markovics are what give the film its compelling perspective. We're fascinated by this man and the details of his work. We get caught up in his struggles - like trying to find exactly the right materials to make the paper for the English pound - and like him, we almost forget the bigger picture.
The Counterfeiters picked up this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (Sony Pictures)
But Ruzowitzky doesn't let us forget. He places reminders about the horrors going on outside of the barracks. At one point they are provided passports to use as samples in order to forge documents, but the counterfeiters discover that the passports come from Auschwitz and from people who have been gassed. At another point, the men hear the gunshots and see the bullets come through their wall when guards shoot a prisoner just outside the Operation Bernhard barracks. So although Sorowitsch does not often look beyond his own needs, Ruzowitzky always remember to do that.
In The Counterfeiters, Burger's alter ego becomes the voice for rebellion. As played by August Diehl, Burger is an idealist who urges his fellow coerced counterfeiters to sabotage the operation no matter what the cost. If they refuse to sabotage the operation then they are simply helping the Germans finance their war. There has been some criticism of Ruzowitzky for exaggerating the resistance of the counterfeiters, and maybe so. On the other hand, he does bring to light a chapter of the war that has not been widely depicted.
The Counterfeiters (in German with English subtitles, and rated R for some strong violence, brief sexuality/nudity and language) may not have been 2007's best foreign language film - that distinction I still feel belongs to Persepolis - but it delivers a fascinating character study that manages to provide a different perspective on familiar period of history. For the most part Ruzowitzky maintains an unsentimental perspective as he employs meticulous detail to bring this character and his film to vivid life.
Companion viewing: Seven Beauties, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Inheritors, The Black Book, Fateless
You can watch a trailer for the film and an interview with Adolf Burger.
More information of the real counterfeiters can be found at the Jewish Chronicle , The Prague Post and Radio Praha .
