General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Counterfeiters (הזייפנים)

The Counterfeiters (Hebrew release title: הזייפנים; original German title: Die Fälscher) is a 2007 Austrian-German drama written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, based on the memoir The Devil's Workshop by Holocaust survivor Adolf Burger. It dramatizes Operation Bernhard, the Nazi plan to flood the British and American economies with counterfeit currency, produced by Jewish prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The film centers on Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, a professional counterfeiter played by Karl Markovics, who is forced to choose between cooperation, which buys survival, and sabotage, which means death. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 80th Academy Awards in February 2008.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Die Fälscher (Germany, Austria), 2007; worldwide English title The Counterfeiters¹
Director and writer	Stefan Ruzowitzky (screenplay), adapting Adolf Burger's memoir The Devil's Workshop³
Lead cast	Karl Markovics as Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, August Diehl as Adolf Burger, Devid Striesow as Friedrich Herzog⁴
Historical background	Operation Bernhard: over £130 million in counterfeit British pounds printed at Sachsenhausen⁵^•⁶
Production	Shot 21 March to 4 May 2006 in Babelsberg, Monte Carlo, and Vienna; produced by Josef Aichholzer, Nina Bohlmann, and Babette Schröder⁷^•⁸
Awards	Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (80th ceremony, 2008); Deutscher Filmpreis Lola, 2007²^•¹
Reception	Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 93% (126 reviews), Popcornmeter 88%; Metacritic Metascore 78; grossed $5.5 million in the United States⁹^•¹⁰
Release	World premiere in the Official Competition of the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival; German theatrical release 15 March 2007¹

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The film opens in prewar Berlin, where Sorowitsch lives well on forged money as the self-styled king of counterfeiters. He is arrested by the police superintendent Friedrich Herzog and sent to a concentration camp. In 1944 he is transferred to Sachsenhausen, where Herzog, now running a secret SS project, has assembled a team of hand-picked prisoners, printers, bank officials, engravers, and artists gathered from camps across Europe, to produce counterfeit foreign currency. The aim is to cripple the British and American economies and to fund the German war effort as its resources run out⁶.

Herzog gives the counterfeiters what the film's own materials call a "golden cage": clean barracks, soft beds, adequate food, and even a ping-pong table, all inside a camp where the Holocaust continues behind a plywood fence. The bargain is explicit. Cooperation offers a chance of survival as first-class prisoners; sabotage means certain death⁶. The drama turns on the resulting conflict between Sorowitsch, who plays along to stay alive, and Burger, a typesetter who had forged documents for the Slovakian resistance before his arrest and who works quietly to undermine the operation. Sorowitsch finds himself protecting the saboteur from the SS and from fellow prisoners who fear that failure dooms them all¹¹.

The historical Operation Bernhard

The film's background is documented history. Operation Bernhard began in 1940 as Operation Andreas, was revived in 1942 under SS Major Friederich Bernhard Krueger, and aimed to destabilize the British economy and finance intelligence operations through forged notes, paying spies and buying supplies including gold. Krueger assembled a team of 142 Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin, housed in blocks 18 and 19, which were separated from the rest of the camp and converted into a fully equipped counterfeiting workshop. The prisoners studied genuine Bank of England notes, identified about 150 deliberate security flaws, replicated the watermarked cotton-rag paper, and aged the finished notes by hand. The operation produced plates for £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes, and counterfeit pounds continued to appear in circulation for years after the war⁵.

By the end of the war the operation had produced over £130 million, a total cited both in the film's press materials and in Adolf Burger's memoir³^•⁶. Burger, a Slovakian printer whose wife was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, wrote The Devil's Workshop (published in German as Des Teufels Werkstatt) immediately after the war; he republished it decades later, when Auschwitz denial began to circulate, and spent his later years lecturing in schools about his experience³. At Sachsenhausen, Burger and his fellow Jewish printers, typesetters, and artists worked under the guidance of a Russian master forger, Salomon Smolianoff, the corresponding character in the film being Salomon Sorowitsch³.

Adaptation and historical liberties

Ruzowitzky has been open about restructuring the record. In a 2008 interview with Cineaste, he said he changed only the chain of events and the time frame, because "the reality was dramatic and absurd enough," and that details such as the Nazis playing music to motivate the inmates and the ping-pong table were historical. Details he judged too absurd to be believed, including the final transfer of the counterfeiters from Sachsenhausen to camps farther from the advancing Red Army, were left out³.

Scholarship has examined these liberties directly. Ned Curthoys, an associate professor in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia, argues in a 2021 College Literature study that the film "unashamedly fictionalizes history" by inventing characters and scenarios absent from Burger's book, in order to sharpen the ethical dilemmas facing the inmates; he reads it as a Bildungsfilm centered on the morally ambiguous Sorowitsch, and notes that it was largely well received even by audiences closely invested in Holocaust memory¹². Critics have made the same observation from a different angle: the Cineaste interview records accusations that the film exaggerates both the possibility of sabotaging the operation and of resistance to the Holocaust³. Ruzowitzky defended the approach as a way of explaining a historical phenomenon through individual lives rather than attempting an encyclopedic account³.

Production and release

Filming ran from 21 March to 4 May 2006 at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, on location in Monte Carlo, and in Vienna, with Aichholzer Filmproduktion of Vienna and Magnolia Filmproduktion of Hamburg as the principal production companies and Studio Babelsberg co-producing⁷^•¹. Funding came from German and Austrian sources, including the German Federal Film Board, the Austrian Film Institute, and Filmfonds Wien¹.

The film premiered in the Official Competition of the 57th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2007 and opened commercially in Germany on 15 March 2007, followed by releases across Europe through 2007 and in the United States in April 2008 under Sony Pictures Classics¹^•¹³^•¹⁴. It was submitted as Austria's candidate for the foreign language Oscar, a nomination announced in March 2007, and won at the 80th Academy Awards on 24 February 2008, beating the Israeli, Polish, Kazakh, and Russian entries⁷^•². It also received the Deutscher Filmpreis (Lola) in 2007, a Grand Prize for Best Film at Ghent, and an audience prize in St. Petersburg¹^•⁸.

Critical reception

Reviews concentrated on Markovics's performance and the film's handling of moral compromise. Rotten Tomatoes reports 93% on the Tomatometer from 126 reviews, with the critics' consensus calling it "a gripping account of one prisoner's moral dilemma, superbly portrayed by Karl Markovics"; the audience Popcornmeter stands at 88%⁹. Metacritic scores it 78 based on 23 critic reviews, with all 23 positive¹⁰.

Several critics drew on the film's structural resemblance to a prison-camp survival thriller. Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun called it a concentration-camp counterpart to The Bridge on the River Kwai, a comparison based on shared themes of overreach and moral drift under a real-life premise¹⁰. Roger Ebert's review acknowledged the film's wrenching subject and the strength of its moral questions while questioning whether its prestige-drama polish suited the material¹¹. The Guardian noted the deliberate strangeness of the setting, where prisoners enjoy clean sheets and a ping-pong table while the Holocaust proceeds out of view¹⁵.

Legacy

The film brought Operation Bernhard to a wide audience; the Bank of England Museum's account of the operation notes that it was dramatized in this Oscar-winning film⁵. Its victory at the 80th Academy Awards, an Austrian-German co-production about German crimes, also placed it in the line of German-language Holocaust dramas that reworked the era's cinematic conventions in the 2000s, alongside films such as Downfall and Sophie Scholl, a context in which critics and scholars have repeatedly situated it³^•¹².

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › Historical dramas and epics › Titles symbols to L › Titles 1 to Em

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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