The Counterfeiters (2007)

just watch it!

good back-story, and good acting

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Atze (Veit Stübner): "Warum ist Gott nicht in Auschwitz? Der kam nicht durch die Selektion!"Die Fälscher is one of my favorite movies about the Holocaust. It's an Austrian film where the Nazi pigs bark in German (not English) and the victims speak, cry and pray in German, Russian, and Hebrew (not English). I can't stand the Holocaust movies where the Nazis speak English with a German accent, no matter how good the movie is. That goes for Schindler's List and many others (the only exception is probably The Pianist, an excellent film that if it were in Polish and German would be a real masterpiece).In Die Fälscher one can really breath the brutality of the small Nazi concentration camps (there are no extermination camps shown here). Viktor Frankl wrote that in the ordinary small concentration camps most of the extermination took place. In Die Fälscher we see a Nazi pig kicking to death a prisoner in Buchenwald and we see how little life was worth in Sachsenhausen (you could be shot any time and for no reason). The elegant and cultivated German Nazis could kill and torture as much as they felt like.The film focuses on the biggest con operation of the entire history: Operation Bernhard. Operation Bernhard managed to counterfeit more than 134 million British pounds and some American dollars. Created in 1942 by the Nazi Germans and developed in Sachsenhausen's Blocks 18 and 19 by 142 Jewish prisoners who were forced to forge millions, Operation Bernhard could have given a dramatic turn to the war. The Nazis counterfeited not only British pounds and American dollars, but also many passports, identity cards, birth and marriage certificates, other official documents, and stamps. The Nazis were not only cruel and monstrous (we know that they loved to gas men, women, and children, and that they enjoyed massacring people and burning babies alive), but they were also great thieves (they stole many Aryan-looking Polish children – after having killed their parents, of course–) and they were also the greatest common criminals: they organized the biggest con operation of all times (but, luckily, too late). The Nazi Germans possessed all of the disgusting and lowest attributes that a human can have: racism, violence, cruelty, and dishonesty. And all that beautiful pack came from one of the most cultivated countries of the entire world. The Germans, with their amazing philosophy, their amazing poetry, their amazing music and their amazing art produced the most horrific monstrosity of human history: the Holocaust.Die Fälscher is loosely based on the memoirs of Adolf Burger, originally written in Czech (Komando padělatelů) and first published in 1983. The translation into English was published only 26 years later (in 2009) under the title The Devil's Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation (I didn't read the book, but I just ordered it). Burger was a Jewish Slovak typographer and Holocaust survivor born in 1917. He was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau together with his wife when he was 25 years old, in 1942. At that time he was making fake baptism certificates to save Jews. In Auschwitz-Birkenau he was tattooed with the number 64401. His wife perished in Auschwitz that year. He survived 18 months in Auschwitz-Birkenau and was then transferred to Sachsenhausen (April 1944) to work in Operation Bernhard. In 1945 he was transferred to the Ebensee concentration camp (a camp within the Mauthausen network) until its liberation by the US Army on May 6, 1945 (that isn't shown in the movie). Burger died 10 months ago in Prague, age 99 (yes, 99!), in December 2016. The casting of the film is superb. Karl Markovics (who portrays Sorowitsch, a character based on the real Salomon Smolianoff, an Ukrainian Jewish professional counterfeiter who died in Brazil at age 76) gives an outstanding performance. I really love this actor. He's amazing. August Diehl (the famous SS whom Fassbender blew his balls off in Inglourious Basterds) plays the real Burger. He appears super thin and his performance is stunning. Sebastian Urzendowsky plays Kolya, a young Russian painter also involved in Operation Bernhard. His performance is breathtaking (Urzendowsky gave an impressive performance too in the German film Berlin'36). Devid Striesow plays the Nazi Herzog, to my taste a too nice and soft character. Herzog is based on the real Bernhard Krüger, a murderous SS who led Operation Bernhard (the operation was named after him). As the vast majority of German and Austrian murderers, Krüger got off scot-free (after a brief period of detention) and died peacefully in Germany at age 84. Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter (Dolores Chaplin) makes a small appearance in the film.The tango music of the film (written by Marius Ruhland) is truly amazing. The details of the film are really painful and really well made: the apple, the bloody hands, the second hand clothing, the touching of the clean bed sheets, the reaction of Kolya at the beginning of the shower, the huge humiliation in the toilet, the walking-corps after the liberation of Sachsenhausen Around 134 million counterfeit British pounds were produced at Sachsenhausen. In 1945 Operation Bernhard moved to Mauthausen. In 1959 some of the boxes with counterfeit British pounds were discovered at the bottom of Lake Toplitz (in the Austrian Alps), and in 2000 the same company who discovered the Titanic pull out from the lake many boxes with counterfeit British pounds and some counterfeit American dollars.Die Fälscher won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language (Austria). After it won the Oscar, Burger said that he felt happy because now more people would see the movie and will know that the Nazis were not just murderers but also common criminals.The worst: some small factual errors.The best: everything else.

Can you be a hero in a concentration camp? Those who survived against near impossible odds in world war did so mostly by being useful to the Nazis. And, on the other side of the fence, can you be a guard and a decent man? On one hand, you are participating in a system of utmost barbarity; and in that milieu, anything short of pure psychopathy might seem like kindness. Can this have any meaning? 'The Counterfeiters' is a classy drama, and true story, about a Jewish forger who made false money to help the Nazis pay for the war; and whose cautious efforts at sabotage certainly feel heroic from the vantage point of a modern armchair. Yet when the camp is liberated, the well-fed highly-skilled forging team seem almost indistinguishable from their former captors in the eyes of their fellow inmates from the less privileged barracks. Many stories about the holocaust chose to address the evil of what happened tangentially, and this tale is no exception: there's a limit to the number of bodies any viewer can bear counting without becoming numb. But 'The Counterfeiters' is both thought provoking and entertaining (in a grim sort of way); and leaves you wanting to know more about its subject.

It's important to separate the subject matter from the movie itself when reviewing this genre.Few will be unmoved by the former, but that's not relevant when considering the latter, except - marginally - to the extent that the film is or is not historically accurate. Feelings about the subject should not affect objectivity when scoring the film's success or otherwise.I watched this on DVD, with English subtitles.The acting I found to be consistently good: the problem I had was with the direction. The action takes place in what can only be described as a series of vignettes, mostly separated by jumpcuts. Fifty years ago, the jumpcut was one of the big no-nos in movie-making: how could an audience follow the action when a shot of the hero putting on his jacket was cut to him driving off in his Healy? Time showed how - people became educated by repetition and nowadays have no problem with such techniques. Jumpcuts move the action along.However, in The Counterfeiters this relaxation of the rules has gone too far, and instead of hurrying the film along I feel the constant jumps actually hinder the feeling of progression, of the storytelling.The reason I call the scenes "vignettes" is because I often got the impression that the script had been episodic in the writing: that a series of bulleted items had been laid out in a list and then the script had followed religiously from them, rather than being crafted as a whole.Then there's the hand-held camera-work. Oh dear! Hasn't it become a cinematic cliché! It is one of my hobby horses I'm afraid, but although the jerky camera works when the movie is showing action as if filmed off the cuff - *in* action as it were - to watch a full length movie with the screen wobbling around for no real reason is just irritating. It doesn't show us anything; it doesn't have any relevance to the story. It's not as if the filming was being accomplished on a smuggled camera in the camp, or this was being simulated. No, no, no.The music track I thought ill-conceived and in many places completely out of sympathy with the subject of the story. Some parts of the track would have been at home in a Python sketch, not a human tragedy.This was not an enjoyable film to watch for obvious reasons, but my comments shouldn't be seen as too much of a criticism: it is very watchable, interesting in the portrayal of friends and foes in a concentration camp with their shifting loyalties and is certainly not a *bad* movie. I'd like to give it an eight, I put it down as a six but have just halved the difference as I post this to make it a strong seven.

Salomon Sorowitsch (superbly played by Karl Markovics) was a thriving Jewish counterfeiter in 1930s Berlin when he was arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. While there, he was put in charge of an operation, set up by the SS, to duplicate foreign currency in an effort both to de-stabilize the Allies' economies and to continue funding the Nazi regime and its war effort. This activity secured for him and his fellow workers numerous privileges - additional food, more humane living conditions, an increased guarantee of safety - that were denied to the other prisoners in the camp.On the surface, "The Counterfeiters" provides us with a grim and disturbing look at life in a Nazi death camp. But, like Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties," it goes much deeper than that, exploring the thorny ethical issue of just how far a human being should be willing to go to ensure his own survival. As Sorowitsch himself states, in a situation such as the one in which he finds himself, "You adapt or you perish," and he refuses to let the Nazis, or anyone else for that matter, make him feel guilty for doing what it takes to stay alive. But soon there is dissension within the ranks, as Burger (August Diehl), a political idealist who believes there's a greater cause beyond their own survival, insists the men sabotage the effort - even if that means he and all his fellow workers die as a result. Yet, thanks to the inmates' delaying tactics, only a small number of dollars were ever produced.Brilliantly acted and solidly directed (by Stefan Ruzowitzky), "The Counterfeiters" is a complex morality tale that will have you questioning your own values and examining your own conscience long after it's over.