A film about the Nazi camp where foreign currency was forged works both as a thriller and a thoughtful exploration of survivor guilt, writes Donald Clarke.
You might have thought that every significant story from the second World War had already been twice told. But Stefan Ruzowitzky, an affable Austrian director, hitherto best known for an anatomical horror shocker, has uncovered one more neglected tale from that eventful era and turned it into a fine film, The Counterfeiters.
In 1942, as the war began to turn against the Germans, it seems that the Nazis devised an extraordinary plan to sabotage the economies of Britain and the United States. One Bernhard Krüger, formerly a counterfeit inspector, began scouring the concentration camps in search of forgers, printers and bankers to assist him in the faking of large numbers of British pounds and US dollars. When the bogus currency was put into circulation, runaway inflation would result and - or so the plan went - the two economies would implode just as Germany's had before the rise of Hitler.
A brave man called Adolf Burger, now 90 years old, has kept this extraordinary story alive. Initially imprisoned in Auschwitz, Burger, a communist and anti-Nazi activist, was later moved to the Sachsenhausen camp to work on the forgery project. Those employed in the scheme were given decent food and proper beds, while just a few metres away the other inmates of the camp were being starved to death. Burger's own wife died in Auschwitz.
"He denies that he suffers from anything like survivor's guilt," Ruzowitzky explains. "He says that, at the time, he would rather have stayed in Auschwitz, because he was certain that, after the counterfeiting was over, the Germans were going to kill them all. Nobody would be alive to tell the tale. Maybe he says that to avoid guilt. I don't know. But he keeps these photographs of concentration camp survivors, and set beside them he and the others from the counterfeit unit look like they have been in a holiday camp."
The Counterfeiters, which manages to be both gripping and appalling, does a good job of delineating the various moral quandaries faced by the inmates and their jailers. The action revolves around a habitual scam artist named Salomon Sorowitsch - based on real-life crook Salomon Smolianoff - who elects to keep his head down, resist foolhardy attempts to escape, and bide his time until the war ends.
Meanwhile Burger, the most principled of the team, devises a plan to sabotage the counterfeiting scheme.
As the picture progresses, our own nagging knowledge of what went on in the main body of concentration camps imposes another level of moral uncertainty on the action.
"I remember Burger went up to one of the actors and said: 'You are not as fat as the real guy'," Ruzowitzky says. "But I felt it is impossible to make a 'normal' concentration camp movie. The actors never look right and the audience just cannot identify with the horror of their situation. It's impossible."
HE SEES PARALLELSbetween the situation of the counterfeit unit and that of the average bourgeois cinema-goer. "Oh yes. Many of us live in a peaceful, comfortable environment, just next door to people who are living in horrible poverty. We give a donation now and again, but we continue to live in comfort. I think the film gets to a universal truth there."
It also has interesting things to say about the irrational guilt of the survivor. "The victims survive hell. Yet once they are liberated they can be tortured by their own consciences. Yet, from what we know, very few of the Nazis who survived felt guilt for their murders or the other terrible things they did."
So those who had the least to feel guilty about sometimes felt the uneasiest? "Yes, yes, yes. It is a very strange thing."
On a more superficial level, The Counterfeitersworks as a gripping yarn about a preposterously unlikely scam. Every now and then you have to remind yourself that the Nazis are attempting to annihilate the world's two mightiest economies from one small shed in a rapidly crumbling Germany. It hardly seems possible that the plan could ever have succeeded.
"Well, it is hard to know, because, as we explain in the movie, they had to change plans," he says. "Initially they did want to sabotage the British economy, but later on they actually needed the money because they were running out of foreign currency. So they used the forged notes to pay for oil and so forth. It gradually spread all over the world."
Some years after the war Adolf Burger was contacted by the police in Czechoslovakia and asked to examine their foreign currency reserves. "They had used a special symbol so that they could tell the forged notes from the real thing. Burger eventually decided that something like a third of the British pounds in the Czech banks were forged. The money was everywhere."
Stefan Ruzowitzky, now 46, sees The Counterfeitersas a useful tool for counteracting the worrying outbreaks of revisionism concerning the Nazi era that are afoot in modern Austria and Germany. As he explains it, politicians such as Jörg Haider, former leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, nod towards the supposed efficiency of the Nazi infrastructure - making the trains run on time and so forth - while failing to address the overpowering atrocities the regime perpetrated.
"I asked myself, as a film-maker: what can I do about these people? I have a duty. Well, I can make a movie dealing with these issues and that is maybe something. Meanwhile these guys are saying: 'Oh yes the Holocaust is a terrible crime, but the Nazis did many good things. They maintained law and order.' All that crap. It always amazes me that people regard this regime that was so criminal as being in favour of law and order."
RUZOWITZKY HAS NOTalways felt the need to deal with "issues" in his films. Initially a theatre director, he moved into television drama in the late 1980s. Ten years ago, his first feature, Tempo, a hip drama concerning a bike messenger, made something of a noise in Germany, but it was the 2000 horror flick Anatomythat properly announced Ruzowitzky to the world. A cult success in many countries, the picture, which focused on a sinister secret society within a medical school, led to a number of offers from Hollywood to direct big-budget sequels. Bravely - ultimately foolishly - Ruzowitzky instead decided to make his English-language debut with a now notorious film entitled All the Queen's Men.
Starring the chilling combination of Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard, the alleged comedy followed a team of British agents who disguise themselves as women to infiltrate a German factory during the second World War. It received spectacularly poor reviews and is said to hold the record for "the American film with the lowest return on investment".
"It was, I suppose, a classic misstep," he admits. "Here you had the typical European director trying to go to Hollywood and not succeeding. We had a German producer, a British script, but, the lead apart, almost no American involvement. You can't approach an American film that way."
Still, he has made a spectacular recovery. The Counterfeitershas played well throughout the world and should bring in a few more offers from the US. Might he take the plunge again?
"You never know," he says. "After the disaster of All the Queen's MenI am cautious. My agent is excited now and we will arrange meetings if it makes sense. There is no point making a bad English-language movie for the sake of it. We will see what happens."
• The Counterfeiters goes on limited release tomorrow.
