ScreenWize

In 1942 Nazi intelligence officers hatched a devious plan to bring down the economies of Britain and America. They would establish, behind the gates of Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, a counterfeiting operation and flood the economies of their enemies with forged bank notes. The plan, known as Operation Bernhard, involved a team of more than 140 prisoners from various countries and backgrounds (including Jewish bankers, Russian printers, and Polish and Czech typographers) and produced almost perfect forged pound notes, still highly sought after by collectors.

The Counterfeiters - which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film - is a highly acclaimed telling of this story, based on the memoirs of Adolf Burger, a Slovakian Jew who was one of the team and who is still alive (there’s an interview with him on Youtube).

The film places Salamon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) at its centre – a Russian-born Jewish master forger, wanted by Interpol before the war. After being arrested and witnessing the horrors of hard-labour and Auschwitz, Sally’s drawing skills come to the attention of the Nazis. He is transferred to Sachsenhausen and joins the already well-equipped counterfeiting team working under the watchful gaze of SS Major Herzog (David Striesow). As Sally turns problems into success, he clashes with Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a prisoner who believes their duty is to sabotage the operation. When Major Hertzog gets more desperate for success and raises the stakes, there’s a battle amongst the prisoners over which is more important: survival or principles.

It’s a gripping account of men on the edge of a moral precipice, and the three central performances stay with you long after you’ve left the cinema. Markovics plays Sally as an instinctive survivor, a sewer rat of a man, weighed down by the past but also able to protect those around him from the deadly vagaries of Nazi behaviour. Diehl is stoical and passionate as the younger man of principle, unable to understand that there are times when the big picture is too hard for others to manage. Striesow, with perhaps the most difficult role as the Nazi officer, is superb as the naturally positive man of integrity caught in a system he clearly finds hard to endure.

Austrian writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky must take much of the credit for finding a refreshingly new angle on the concentration camp story, and complements this originality with some highly contemporary cinematography and an unusual choice of accompanying music. It’s one of the best films released this year.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon