The Rabbit Hole I fell into after I was given Counterfeit Money
I got scammed, but then I learned about 'Operation Bernhard'
Warsaw
Recently I was up in Warsaw for a stag party, or what you Americans call a bachelor party.
A stag party sounds way cooler than a bachelor party. I don’t know, but when I hear the words “bachelor party” I just think of a group of old farmers sitting in a rural pub playing cards and guffawkking at each other in grunts and moans as tricks are won and lost.
When I hear ‘stag party’ it conjures images of rutting stags taking breaks in bouts to down whiskey and pints of stout. Which is kind of what we did. However, it involved rats, throwing axes, and insane taxi drivers.
Regardless, what happens in Warsaw, remains in Warsaw, and so the festivities were over, and I was feeling a tad tender in both mind and body.
You can imagine how much alcohol get ingested at a stag party that’s attended by a couple of Irish, England and Polish lads. I was catching a train to the airport to fly south to Katowice when a gentleman approached me.
Train station scammer
He told me a sob story about needing some money for a train to another city. Well, normally, I’d have just said, "Naw, sorry buddy, I’ve no money on me," but I was so hungover I just wanted him gone, so I said, "Yeah, I can give you 20 zloty, but you need to give me change." I had two 50-zloty notes on me, and I told him I needed 80 zloty to pay for my parking.
Now, I’d thought maybe he wasn’t lying and possibly he did need the money, but no, he was definitely lying, he took out a monster wod of notes and gave me 30 zloty in change. And off he went on his merry way, complimenting me on my hold of the Polish language. Flattery will get you everywhere.
But the notes didn’t seem right.
They seemed slightly smaller than they should have been. I went looking for the lad to discuss this, but he was obviously long gone.
The train station had a currency exchange, so I went upstairs and asked the lady there if the notes were real. She said they were, but I wasn’t convinced.
Airport
So, at the airport, I hit up two others. The first lady gave me the A-OK and said they were good; the second place, though, she got out her pen and her purple light thing, and she said they were the best copies she’d ever seen.
Ah-ha. I knew I’d been scammed. She said she had to keep them though. I’m sure she binned them, or sent them to the bank to be destroyed.
My strange luck continued at the airport. My flight was delayed for a while, and so I wouldn’t fall asleep, I walked up and down the length of the airport to stay awake. I stopped my stroll for some food and took out my phone to read something. And so, I googled ‘counterfeit money.’
Operation Bernhard
Bizarrely, one of the first things that popped up was ‘Operation Bernhard.’ The Wikipedia page opened with, “Operation Bernhard was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British bank notes.”
Following the failure of the Battle of Britain, the Nazis decided they’d try to destabilize the British economy by flooding the country with counterfeit notes. They planned to airdrop around £300 million.
Now, these days, £300 doesn’t sound like an awful lot of money, but back then, £300 would have amounted to adding around 40% extra money into the market.
In simpler terms, it would have bankrupted the country.
The Eastern front
They very almost did it, too, and the reason it didn’t take place, in the end, was because Germany couldn’t spare the airplanes to get the airdrops done. The tide had turned against the Nazis on the Eastern front, and they were losing to the Russians. So, most of their airplanes concentrated on trying to regain their foothold.
Operation Bernhard hinged on the talents of a man named Salomon Smolianoff. Smolianoff was a Ukrainian Jew who had settled in Italy after his parents had to flee Ukraine (then Russia) following the Soviet Revolution. Seeking work, he and his wife moved to Germany, where he met a counterfeiter who taught him the ins and outs of the work.
Smolianoff’s talents soon meant he was on the radar of many European police agencies, but at the outbreak of WWII, he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. At the camp, he dug in and tried his best to stay alive by working as an artist and doing portraits for the Nazi guards.
When Operation Bernard began, Alfred Naujocks, a high-ranking SS Officer, was in charge. However, due to a lack of progress, he soon fell out of favor with the higher-ups, and Bernhard Krüger took the reins.
He’d heard of Smolianoff’s artistic talents, and he had him transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Smolianoff would head the counterfeiting. To begin with, another 29 Jewish prisoners were used, while at the end of the operation, some 80 people were involved.
Figuring out the type of paper to use was their first hurdle, they ended up using recycled rags mixed with paper to get the same consistency as the British pound.
Next, they had to figure out how to do the watermarks correctly, and then they had to figure out how to crack the code for serial numbers. They succeeded, but the prisoners knew that they couldn’t work too fast because if they did, then their captors wouldn’t need them anymore, and they’d surely be killed.
I cannot imagine the pressure they must have felt to both deliver for their Nazi captors and also try to stay alive as long as possible, hoping the war would come to an end.
They were also working on counterfeiting the US dollar at the same time.
As I said above, the plan was to airdrop the money over Britain and cause havoc. This couldn’t occur because the planes were being used over Russia, so now the Nazis were sitting on £300 million they couldn’t use, or could they?
A double agent brought some money to Switzerland to see if he could change it at a bank. The Swiss bank told him it was real, but, like me at the airport, he didn’t believe it, so he asked them to send the money to Britain to be checked.
It passed the test in Britain; the money was so good that the Bank of England officially accepted it.
So, what did they do? Well, they couldn’t airdrop it, but they could certainly spend it. So, the Nazis went on a spending spree, buying up art and luxury goods from all across Europe. The money was used by a Turkish agent, codenamed Cicero, to bribe the British ambassador in Ankara to obtain military plans.
The notes were used to buy arms from Yugoslav Partisans to sell them to pro-Nazi groups in the Balkans, and up to £100,000 was spent to obtain information that led to the freeing of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the Gran Sasso raid in 1943.
The money disappeared into the black market, and the Nazis would either sell the notes to line their pockets in the dying stages of the war or buy up art and goods.
It wasn’t until 1957 that the British properly reacted. Knowing there were so many fake notes in circulation, they issued a new £5 banknote, and more new banknotes were released in the following years.
And so, here I was, stuck in an airport having had two forged notes in my possession, feeling sorry for myself with a sore head and an unsettled stomach but thanking my lucky stars that I was born too late to experience the horrors of war. Being ripped off for a few quid is annoying but it doesn’t compare.
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