Krueger's Men Read online

  The idea that a team of printers, graphic artists, and accountants, all bearing the Nazi equivalent of the mark of Cain, would be employed in what might otherwise be a vast criminal enterprise and then disposed of as casually as a herd of cattle, at first seemed no crime at all in the murderous context of a concentration camp. To the prisoners themselves it seemed a blessing, or at least an opportunity to mitigate the harshness of their treatment. The original draft of thirty-nine prisoners, swept into an incomprehensible situation, at first felt humiliated and whispered among themselves: “What will others say when they think of us as counterfeiters?” These were, after all, Jews who had earned respectability in the alien society of pre-war Europe. At first some saw an opportunity for revenge, most forcefully Max Bober, a tough Berlin printer.

  With the lights out and the guards withdrawn, Bober argued for the “silent satisfaction” of sabotage by sloppy work in this “swinish operation.” He urged his comrades: “You must not be resigned to allowing a pitiful crown to be pressed on our heads. We now have a weapon in our hands we must use.… We know nothing about whether our wives and children are alive or dead.”

  This emotional appeal was countered by the cooler logic of Jaroslav Kaufmann, a Czech dentist, who warned that they would be betting their “whole bankroll” — their very lives. He argued: “The Nazis will need more and more of this bogus money, so they will need us increasingly. If you sabotage, they won’t need us any more and will kill us with this secret.”

  Kaufmann won them over. Bober, with his expansive personality, became the barracks major-domo and helped initiate newcomers into the agreed method of survival. Sabotage was never again contemplated until the final days of the war made stalling worthwhile, although even that had its limits.

  Krueger had his own nuanced view. He clearly thought of the operation as a soldier’s duty but also an onerous challenge that might endanger himself if he failed. But he was cool enough never to offer a hint of that as he faced his workers for the first time at Sachsenhausen. Mostly, he hoped that the shock and relief of their sudden reversal of fortune would win them over and turn them into motivated, industrious workers. He addressed them in order to introduce Petrich and the two guardroom sergeants and to alert them that he and they alike were working under Himmler’s special orders. He continued:

  Those of you who have long and involuntarily been out of professional life because of your incarceration have an advantage, because you will be working with modern, complicated machinery and will first have to learn the techniques under the supervision and guidance of Master Printer Petrich. You will begin with simple printing tasks.

  Always remain aware of the proper performance of your tasks. I put the greatest value on smooth cooperation. Practice this within and outside your community. The perspectives of your camp service are different from before. SS Unterscharfuehrers Marock and Weber are responsible for supervising your work. You are always to turn [first] to them. Both are obligated to treat you correctly and are answerable for order in Block 19.

  Work begins daily at 7 o’clock and ends at 4 o’clock. Lunchtime is from 12 to 1 p.m. There is no work on Sunday. If you have complaints, whatever their nature, tell me. I am also available for personal questions.

  As of today, you are freed from participation in camp roll call. Did you understand me?

  The prisoners replied to this blessed reprieve with a rousing yes.

  Chapter 7

  THE COUNTERFEITERS OF BLOCK 19

  Over a period of about two years, from the autumn of 1942 to the autumn of 1944, Krueger made these selections, starting with the vanguard of prisoners in Block 19 until he had assembled a crew of just over 140 prisoners from fifteen nations and representing fifty-five trades or professions, mainly Jews but some Mischlinge. Some Jews volunteered, gambling between the hope of lighter work and the risk of the unknown that was the essence of life and death in a concentration camp. Almost all were skilled craftsmen or professionals. Some simply faked their connections with the printing trade. One of those was Richard Luka, a Czech civil engineer who had spent four years in Buchenwald and said he would have applied “even if they had been looking for sword-swallowers.” The first to be picked was more typical: Felix Cytrin, forty-eight, a toolmaker and engraver in Leipzig until his arrest. With a high forehead and hooded eyes, he was intelligent and methodical by nature, made suspicious by prison experience. He soon was named chief of the engraving section and worked on the plates with his four assistants. The plates were made by government engravers, probably drawn from the Reichsbank but doing wartime duty at the German military espionage center deep in a nearby forest at Friedenthal Castle, whose secrets were protected by antiaircraft guns.

  Petrich came from Berlin to supervise the engraving at Friedenthal and teach the prisoners at Sachsenhausen how to use the machinery, but he soon proved superfluous. Krueger’s story was that the prisoners preferred working without Petrich’s domineering daily supervision and actually did better on their own. Petrich remained at Friedenthal, where civilian technicians photographed genuine pound notes, enlarging them sixfold to discern the details and then reducing the photos to etch them on metal. Cytrin and his men then carefully retouched the Friedenthal plates and “vastly improved” them, in Krueger’s own complimentary words. The SS major demanded nothing less than perfection, and the prisoners were both pleased and relieved to follow his orders to the letter. The more carefully they worked, the longer they could stretch out the operation and their own lives.

  Despite their technical skills, the first prisoners were ordered to perform clerical drudgery for three weeks as Block 19 was readied for them. Cytrin recalled: “We sat from morning to night counting strips of paper. We were practicing counting banknotes. We counted and counted until we were going mad. A Gestapo-pig was in charge, and he was ten times worse than [the SS sergeants] Marock and Weber put together. He waved his revolver and hollered like a stuck pig every time we even lifted our eyes from the strips of paper.”

  This enforced familiarization with the paper was not just make-work. Matching the Bank of England’s paper was Krueger’s first and most difficult production problem. The long fibers in a printed sheet of British notes left a slightly ragged edge as they were removed from the mold and torn into two individual bills, leaving them with what are known as deckle edges. To speed production, the Germans had decided to print four bills on one larger sheet of paper. The properties of the principal ingredients of papers differ widely, depending on the soil and climate where the cotton, flax, and ramie are grown and the water in which they are pulped. Successfully replicating and cutting fine paper is as difficult as making and bottling fine wine. Even if the raw materials come from different shipments, genuine notes of different issues nevertheless emit only infinitesimally different fluorescent tones when examined under the ultraviolet light of a quartz lamp, which was then the principal tool for detecting any counterfeit bill. Industrialized Germany had also lost the art of making paper by hand, and there is a telltale difference between the fibers of machine-made and handmade paper. The former run in one direction, while the fibers of handmade paper, lifted in one mass from a pulping vat and then pressed dry, have no bias in any direction. This paper will usually remain flat when immersed in water, while machine-made paper will curl.

  Krueger tested more than a hundred sample batches before he felt confident he could match the strong, thin British paper, with the familiar and distinctive sheen and crackle. He abandoned the Spechthausen factory that had ill served Operation Andreas and turned to Schleicher & Schuell, manufacturers of cigarette papers and coffee filters. It helped that the water in their Hahnemühle plant near Hannover bubbled through meadows in a clear trout stream carrying “few suspended particulates” as Krueger carefully noted. Clear streams also supplied the Portal plant in England’s rural Hampshire, and Krueger finally claimed 95 to 97 percent of Hahnemühle’s production was good enough to serve his purposes.

  The washbasins
and toilets in the center of Block 19 conveniently separated the workshop from the sleeping quarters, each section about a hundred feet long. The prisoners slept on individual cots, not on standard wooden concentration camp tiers with three or four inmates to a shelf and each man’s feet in another man’s face. They also were assigned personal lockers and exchanged their striped uniforms for used civilian clothing painted with a broad red stripe on the trouser legs and a red cross on the jacket. In many cases the clothes had been worn shiny, but they were warmer and more comfortable than prison rags. The prisoners were also allowed to grow their hair and thus retain some of their individuality.

  New arrivals were issued a towel and soap, a food dish, and a knife, fork, and spoon. They ate at wooden tables, and their rations were black bread and soup that, like all food in Germany, deteriorated throughout the war into a foul brew of grass, tomato leaves, and potatoes. It was called spinach soup, although the closest thing to spinach was the sand that got in their teeth. But they also received a small cigarette ration of Zora ten-packs made of yellow tobacco from Yugoslavia, and sometimes they were served jam and even margarine. A majority of the German and Czech prisoners were only part-Jewish and had non-Jewish wives or relatives who were allowed to send them food parcels supplementing their diet. Krakowski recalled arriving early in 1944 to “a bowl of the most delicious hot oatmeal, cooked in milk and sugar, and afterwards, hot coffee with cream and sugar, as much as we wanted” — although it proved too much for this emaciated prisoner from Auschwitz. But they were fed potato-and-sauerkraut soup on Sundays, which were, wonder of wonders, rest days to play chess, cards, Ping-Pong, and listen to the state-run radio, from which they could obliquely plot the course of the war. Every week they were led out to the showers, where sadistic guards switched the water from scalding hot to freezing cold without warning.

  But the men in Block 19 were kept in a semblance of health. So this would be neither a work camp nor a death camp, but halfway between: a death camp with a difference. Like all Jews under Nazi dominion, death was to be their eventual fate, only for them it would be more certain or less, depending on unpredictable events. To anyone familiar with life in wartime, this is not as unusual as it sounds. Virtually every survivor tells a story in which utter chance plays the determining role.*

  Once the machinery arrived from Delbrückstrasse and was installed on December 2, 1942, the gates of Block 19 slammed shut. It became a world unto itself, with its own doctor, a Pole named Boris Rojzen; a barber; repairmen; and its own diesel-powered generator. One new group was greeted by the chief printer, Arthur Levin from Berlin: “Friends, from here there is no exit. Only an accident can deliver us from this life, and we have to trust in this accident.” When a fire broke out on the barracks roof, Krueger’s prisoners had to save their own lives by forming a bucket brigade; machine gunners outside the wire mesh prevented anyone from fleeing with the secrets of Operation Bernhard or firemen from entering to discover them. The prisoners had been warned repeatedly that death was the penalty for disclosing anything about Operation Bernhard. When the Moritz Nachtstern was taken to a physician, he was asked what they did in Block 19. With an armed guard at his elbow, the prisoner replied, “Shovel sand.”

  Gradually the workshop expanded into a factory occupying Blocks 18 and 19, which were knitted together by a new barbed-wire mesh of double thickness. One prisoner likened it to being inside a mousetrap. The buildings were separated by a narrow strip for exercise and recreation with four Ping-Pong tables. Inside were the most modern printing machines, a book bindery, a photo laboratory, an engraving workshop, and a countinghouse. In addition to the counterfeit pounds, the prisoners forged passports and identification documents. Visas, date markings, and rubber stamps were available from an inventory of 68,000 representing government bureaus, banks, and other institutions in scores of countries, all stolen or copied from original documents.

  Trial and error played a part in Krueger’s method. A spot of water dropped unintentionally on a test bill led to the solution of one problem, a drop of household cleanser another. Nor was Krueger above seeking help from the prisoners themselves. Artur Springer, a fifty-five-year-old Czech businessman, had been nursed back to health in a prison hospital to join the vanguard, an extraordinary effort to save any prisoner, especially a Jew. It soon became obvious why: upon arrival Springer had remarked to his fellow-prisoners that he knew “a little bit about paper.” Shortly after his recovery, Krueger appeared in the barracks, welcomed “Herr Springer” with great courtesy, and allowed the newcomer to precede him through the door of the sleeping quarters to tour the printing plant.

  During its manufacture at the Hahnemühle factory, the paper for the counterfeit bills had to be watermarked with wavy lines, the batch code of each issue, and the denomination spelled out as 5, 10, and so on. The principles of watermarking are simple: As pulp emerges from the vat, it is almost 99 percent water, which is pressed out by successive rollers or screens, one of which squeezes out slightly less water in an embedded pattern that can be seen when the sheet is held up to the light. Since the watermark is a security feature, it has to be impressed with tolerances to the millimeter and coordinated just as closely with the images printed on the bill. “It took unending patience to discover how the watermark effect was created, its intaglio impress, and its striking dark and light transparencies,” Krueger wrote. Given such demanding specifications, paper production could be erratic. In the early days, there were sometimes no deliveries for several weeks; the prisoners would begin to think that Operation Bernhard had been suspended and they were done for. “It was a nerve-wracking period,” Nachtstern recalled. “Had they discontinued the plant, the road to the crematorium wouldn’t have been long for us.”

  The delays arose because Krueger kept trying to achieve a total match but never quite succeeded, and he knew it. He later wrote: “It was never possible to eliminate entirely the difference between the soft-blue fluorescence of the British and the bluish-gray of the B[ernhard]-notes under the quartz lamp. But given the deceptively close visual identity, the odds were against anyone resorting to a quartz lamp… From a psychological view, it was unthinkable to wage war against the English pound with a quartz lamp. Chemical additives did not eliminate the fluorescent discrepancy but markedly weakened it.”

  Setting aside the problem of paper, an old-fashioned five-pound note appears deceptively easy to counterfeit. Apart from the engraved lines of the Britannia vignette, the bill seems merely to spell out the Bank’s classic promise to pay the bearer a specific sum, with the promise and date arrayed in elegant calligraphy, all guaranteed by the bold signature of the Bank’s chief cashier. The bills had no crosshatched or geometric patterns, known as a guilloche, which are difficult to duplicate and so complex that they now are engraved by computer. There was, however, a code or “cypher” of a few numbers and letters identifying each batch.

  Right into the war, the Bank of England had maintained a complex, cross-referenced process of authentication for each bill it issued. It was the job of the technicians at the Note Issue Office to number, disburse, and keep track of all pound notes. The senior officials as well as the technicians at the Bank believed their system to be virtually inscrutable. All notes of five pounds or more were given a place and date — for example: London, August 8, 1938 — and no more than 100,000 bills were printed with that date, often less. Each batch was assigned an alphanumeric code that appeared in small letters — say, B258 — its cypher. And each bill had its own serial number indicating its sequence within that batch. There were enough alphanumeric batch numbers to last forty years, at which point the cycle would start again. But there was no risk of duplication because by then the Office of Chief Cashier, whose bold signature was printed on each bill, would certainly be occupied by someone else.

  The functionaries of the Note Issue Office believed this would trip up counterfeiters, but with typical British insularity, they overlooked one thing: the pound sterling, as the Germans
well knew, was an international currency. Forgers abroad simply had to duplicate a bill that was easy to fake, and then copy the batch and serial numbers straight from a real one. As long as the counterfeit bill did not actually reach Threadneedle Street for inspection (and foreign banks only cabled the dates, numbers, and letters for verification), counterfeits could be blithely passed from hand to hand.

  Producing a duplicate on a plain press seemed simple to any printing specialist, and matching up the identifying codes only slightly more complex. The least trouble was presented by the ink used by the Bank of England. It was known as Frankfort black because its pigment was made from the charcoal of German grapevines boiled in linseed oil. Schmidt Brothers of Berlin produced it, and Krueger improved it to imitate ink’s normal spread into banknote paper over the years.

  Since the black-and-white notes first made their appearance in the 1830s, the Bank had erected its own secret hurdles against counterfeiting. During the Weimar Republic, the Reichsbank recognized this and asked for samples, which were supplied with great reluctance by London and heavily stamped SPECIMEN. It was only after many different pound notes from the Germans’ regular stock were enlarged and projected onto screens in Friedenthal and Sachsenhausen that sharp-eyed engravers in both places, working on different bills in tandem and literally comparing notes, realized how many security marks had been deliberately designed to pose inconspicuously as minor printing flaws.

  Before the war, most freelance counterfeiting gangs ignored these marks at their peril, underwriting the Bank’s smug certainty that its specialists would quickly recognize any fakes and confiscate them. Over the years, the Bank’s engravers had carved as many as 150 different security marks, varying them as they changed plates for new issues after press runs of 100,000. The Britannia medallion itself always had three secret marks: a group of five dots on the back of her right hand, a shading line down the length of her spear that stopped slightly short of the base of its handle, and a hairline break across the shading lines in the upper-right section of foliage surrounding the figure. On some issues, the shield was irregularly curved and the sea variously shaded. The prisoners came to call the engraving “Bloody Britannia” and missed some of these details, but not many, as they learned to become master counterfeiters, spotting and duplicating the purposely malformed text letters, the tiny nicks in the large letters of the elaborately carved blocks that denoted the value of each bill in words rather than numbers, and the almost invisible dots they called “flyspecks.” They soon learned to look for a tiny, off-center dot just above the i in the signature of chief cashier Peppiatt. Furthermore, one p in his name had a little swallowtail; if the plate had been too heavily inked, it would blur or blot out.