Film

A minor entry in the problematic genre of Holocaust cinema, Austria’s foreign-language Oscar winner tells the story of Operation Bernhard, the German plot to push the United States and Britain toward financial disaster by passing large sums of phony money into their economies. The Germans were aided by a team of counterfeiters handpicked from the camps, who received relatively hospitable accommodations for their efforts. In the film, they’re led by “world’s best counterfeiter” Salomon Sorowitsch (Markovics)—loosely based on a man named Salomon Smolianoff—who argues that self-preservation trumps principle.

In The Pianist, survival was presented as a matter of random chance. By contrast, The Counterfeiters more or less celebrates Sally’s wiles in playing the Nazis, as well as his skill in producing 132 million British pounds. (The final title card contains no information about Sorowitsch/Smolianoff, but informs us that only a “very small number of dollars” was produced—as if that were the point of the story.) Ruzowitzky has a Communist inmate (Diehl) on hand to propose sabotage, but always makes sure that Sally—helping a consumptive comrade, not squealing on his fellow prisoners—comes out in an unambiguously virtuous position. The most powerful sequence comes at war’s end, when the counterfeiters exit their ghetto of decent meals and firm beds and confront Sachsenhausen’s other Jews, emaciated and near dead. The Counterfeiters never grapples with that moment, or with the ethics of what it means to have survived by betrayal.