New Films

98 minutes, Austria/Germany (2007), 15

Intense wartime drama based on the true story of concentration camp Jews who escaped the gas chambers by counterfeiting for the Nazis

Operation Bernhard was the Nazi plan to forge millions of British pounds and US dollars, with which to flood their enemies’ economies while filling their own, flagging war chest. In the biggest counterfeiting scam ever, Jewish printers, typographers and others in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp forged £130 million. But their work in the so-called ‘golden cage’ of Sachsenhausen presented these prisoners with a terrible moral dilemma: the more money they produced, the longer they stayed alive - and the more they bolstered the Nazi war effort.

While placing the ethical issue at the heart of his story, writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky refuses to be weighed down by it. This is a tense, taut and - dare one say it - enjoyable drama. As such it offers an interesting contrast with Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 The Grey Zone, which dealt with the Auschwitz Jews who operated the gas chambers. That film was thought-provoking, certainly, but so determinedly grim it was impossible to watch.

The key to The Counterfeiters‘ success is the choice of its hero, or anti-hero - the one crook amongst the craftsmen, the professional forger Salomon Sorowitsch. We first see Sorowitsch (Markovics), a Russian Jew, in Berlin in 1936, where he is enjoying a flamboyant lifestyle funded by his consummate counterfeiting. When he’s caught, he is sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, where he survives the next few years by painting portraits for the SS. Then Herzog (Striesow), the man in charge of Operation Bernhard, has him transferred to Sachsenhausen.

Separated from the rest of the camp, the forgers have comfortable beds, plentiful food, music and - as long as they are making money - reprieve. Yet they can still hear the screams from the other side of the fence. These reminders, along with professional pride, prompt Sorowitsch to try to produce the perfect dollar for Herzog. In contrast, the idealistic Adolf Burger (Diehl) does everything he can to sabotage his efforts.

Played with extraordinary subtlety by Markovics, Sorowitsch is a complex figure: a bona fide artist who would rather forge than paint; a pragmatist whose willingness to do whatever it takes to stay alive belies a genuine compassion; his shifty exterior merely the carapace of a man who knew much grief, at the hands of the Soviets before he even arrived in Germany.

Ruzowitzky’s direction is equally subtle. Just as the conspirators are shielded from the full cruelty of the camp, so too is the audience. When it does intrude - not least in the first meeting between these favoured inmates and their near-dead comrades - it is all the more horrifying.

Verdict
An absorbing new perspective on the moral, physical and emotional adversity faced in the concentration camps, with one of the most unusual anti-heroes, of any genre, of recent years.

http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=163113