Customer Reviews

Counterfeiter: How a Norwegian Jew survived the Holocaust (General Military)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Moritz Nachstern was the only member of his family left in Norway when he was arrested and held in prison camps first in Norway (Berg) and then deported on the D/S Donau to Stettin and then to Auschwitz. One of only a few to survive initial selection, his background in typography gave him an opportunity to live by contributing to the Third Reich's ambitious currency counterfeiting scheme, housed in a separate area of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

His account, among the first ever told by Norwegian survivors, is a candid exposition of both the counterfeiting operation and the conditions within the block. Driven both by the threat of immediate death and professional pride, a mixed assembly of prisoners labored to create a money printing press, all the while keeping their work secret within the concentration camp.

Nachstern tells of episodes that would be comical if they didn't so often result in murder and provides a view into a world of madness within utter barbarism and lawlessness.

Nachtstern was one of only 28 of the 770 or so Jews shipped from Norway who survived the camps. He returned to Norway, married, and started a family, but he struggled for the rest of his life to adjust to the memories. This is an unusual story, not just for the events it portrays, but also because Nachtstern somehow succeeds in portraying all those involved as humans, though often deeply flawed.

COUNTERFEITER: HOW A NORWEGIAN JEW SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST is an addition for both general-interest lending libraries strong in Holocaust studies and for World War II or Judaic history holdings. It tells of the Nazi secret project, Operation Bernhard, which used prisoners to produce counterfeit British bank notes - considered some of the most perfect counterfeits ever produced - which were to be dropped over London to destabilize the British economy. Author Moritz Nachtstern was one of those picked for the program: his story of survival and the project offers unusual, gripping insights.

Reading this book you sometimes feel as if you are not reading a book about the Holocaust but rather about a "business" that is being run in wartime. That is in fact the unfortunate part of the story because the individuals who are portrayed in this book were in fact inmated in one of the worst concentration camps in the Holocaust--Sachenhausen (close to modern-day Berlin). They were forced to work on behalf of the German war effort printing counterfeit money of all kinds. As you read the book you find yourself saying "wow these individuals who were chosen were "lucky" because they had a job that pretty well sheltered them from the rest of the inmates and undoubtedly keep them alive longer than many of their peers. It is a similar argument or discussion that one may have around the issue of the Lodz Ghetto vs. the Warsaw Ghetto. In the Lodz Ghetto, the citizens worked on behalf of the war effort and many of them stayed alive longer than their peers in the Warsaw Ghetto who revolted and primarily died. Not a perfect comparison but a similar idea.

This was a good book well worth reading as it provides a look into an aspect of the Holocaust that has not been widely reported on.

Counterfeiter is a moving report of survival in Nazi concentration camps written in simple terms by a man haunted by the horrors of his past.

The book was in new condition however it had a large white Amazon sticker on the
lower section of the back dust jacket. When I tried to remove it, I could not get
it off without ripping the dustcover. I don't know why Amazon has to put a sticker
on a book, I know I bought it from them. If they need to, for whatever reason to put a sticker on a book, then use one that can be removed. I find that kind of
sticker on books that I buy all the time.

I found this book a little disappointing because the title would imply that it is going to talk about the German counterfeiting of British pound notes in depth, as other books have done, but it is more of a bibliography of the author's life both as a youth and later in a concentration camp. That will probably be fine for many readers, but since I was interested in the technical aspects of the counterfeiting plot, it did not exactly satisfy my curiosity. There have been about a half-dozen books written about this particular German operation, and at least one movie, and this book is not among the strongest of them. I did find one part interesting. There has always been a great debate about what American greenbacks were counterfeited in Sachsenhausen. In the past it has always been the $100 bill, with some authors also mentioning a $20 bill. Author Moritz Nachtstern says that there were $50 bills produced there. That does make for an interesting argument. The counterfeiters talk about their work at different times:

"We will soon begin the manufacture of 50-dollar bills en masse. I swear old Uncle Sam is going to be so bloated with dollar bills that he will burst..."

"It won't be long and you'll see a 50-dollar bill that beat everything in the industry. It will be my life's masterpiece..."

"Are you completely finished with it? Does it look good? You should have seen Kruger. He embraced me and carried on like a maniac. I can tell you this men; if anyone has produced a better 50-dollar bill than mine, he has not been discovered."

So, I found little new data in the book that I have not already read elsewhere, but it did help to define what banknotes were forged, an argument that is still going on among some specialists in the field of wartime counterfeiting.