Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19

by Lawrence Malkin

Overview

This true story details the greatest counterfeiting scheme in history and the men the Nazis called upon to help it succeed: a group of concentration-camp Jews.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316067508
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	03/24/2008
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

In his long career as a journalist, Lawrence Malkin was the European correspondent of Time magazine and New York correspondent for the International Herald Tribune. He has collaborated on memoirs by Paul Volcker, Anatoly Dobrynin, Markus Wolf, and Stuart Eizenstat. His work has also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Connoisseur, and the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in New York with his wife.

Table of Contents

Author's Note     vii
Major Characters     viii
Map: Europe Under the Nazis     x
Attack the Pound the World Around     1
Operation Andreas     17
Whitehall and the Old Lady     33
Nobel Prize-winning Ideas     48
The Counterfeit Chain of Command     63
Ingathering of the Exiles     79
The Counterfeiters of Block 19     95
"The Most Dangerous Ever Seen"     114
Better than Wall Street     128
What the Pounds Really Bought     139
The Dollar Deception     149
Toward the Caves of Death     169
Epilogue     186
Notes     211
Bibliography     253
The Forgers of Operation Bernhard     262
A Note on Sources     269
Index     273

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Michael Prichard reads...Malkin's riveting narrative with an authoritative voice…. Prichard's ability to change tone and pace is particularly effective." —-AudioFile

Editorial Reviews

Former Time correspondent Malkin tells a remarkable, little-known story from WWII: the Nazis' use of concentration camp prisoners to produce counterfeit British (and later American) currency and dump it to sabotage the Allied economies. Some readers might find Malkin's setup a bit slow, but the main events, deeply researched and tautly narrated, form a tale of opportunism made for a movie. The Nazis realized the labor could be drawn from concentration camps, and the prisoners realized that volunteering for the effort could save their lives. At the height of the operation, headed by SS officer Bernhard Krueger, the Jewish prisoners produced 650,000 notes a month. The counterfeiting helped finance some Nazi spy efforts, as well as other parts of the Reich's war machine, but it failed to bring down the Allies. As gripping as the tale of Operation Bernhard is, the story of how the Jewish counterfeit brigade most of them prisoners at Sachsenhausen survived the waning days of the war is even more so. 8 pages of b&w photos, 2 maps. (Oct. 12) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Seasoned journalist Malkin (The National Debt, 1987) tells the compelling story of the Third Reich's attempt to wreck the British economy by flooding Europe with millions of counterfeit British pounds. Germany may have lost the war, but from 1942 to 1945, it succeeded in perfecting the art of counterfeiting British pounds: 132 million of them, worth U.S. $535 million. The highly skilled counterfeiters were mostly Jewish concentration-camp inmates whose success at mass-producing fake British notes proved to be their means of escaping the gas chambers. The 140-plus members of the counterfeit team, which worked out of Block 19 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were handpicked from the prisoner population by Bernhard Krueger, an SS officer whose generally benign treatment of his counterfeiters belied his knowledge that all were to be exterminated at war's end. Malkin unravels the German plot in a methodical, concentrated narrative. Along the way, he introduces us to a score of curious characters, including Salomon Smolianoff, a professional Russian con man and master counterfeiter; Elyesa Bazna, the Turkish master spy known as "Cicero" to his British handlers; and Friedrich Schwend, the Germans' oily chief money launderer, who slipped away to Argentina after the war. Equally shady are the stodgy British lords at the Bank of England who ignored numerous warnings about the counterfeiting plot, then actively covered up evidence of its success after the war, even as London's dog-track bookies were refusing to accept British five-pound notes for fear of getting fakes. The author's dry, trenchant prose isn't terribly exciting, but his thorough research and authoritative voice enable thisfascinating chapter of history to hold interest. Gripping proof that indeed all is fair in love and war.

Kirkus Reviews

"Michael Prichard reads...Malkin's riveting narrative with an authoritative voice…. Prichard's ability to change tone and pace is particularly effective." ---AudioFile

From the Publisher

KRUEGER’S MEN is more than the untold story of a Nazi plot to destroy the British economy during WWII. It is also the account of how a group of Jews, forced to assist the Nazis in counterfeiting millions, used guile and intelligence to foil the plot and to save their own lives. Michael Prichard reads journalist Malkin’s riveting narrative with an authoritative voice, and a sense of fascination and admiration that sounds as though he can’t wait to turn the page. Prichard’s ability to change tone and pace is particularly effective during the scenes in which the Nazis fall prey to the prisoners’ deceptions and ignorantly proceed without any idea that their efforts are preordained to fail. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

APR/MAY 07 - AudioFile