Adolf Burger, inmate forced by Nazis to forge money, dies

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“After my wife died in Auschwitz, I had two choices: either to go and touch the barbed wire with 1000 voltage in it and be dead in a second, or stay alive,” Burger said in a 2007 radio interview for the Stories of the 20th Century project. “I chose life, so I can tell everyone what they have done here.”

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At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany in 1944, Burger became one of some 140 inmates who were put to work forging British pound notes, a top secret plan to destabilize Britain known as “Operation Bernhard.”

“They all had to be Jews, or half Jews,” he said of the counterfeiting group in a radio interview. “That’s logical. Those who know such a secret are not supposed to survive.”

Burger did, though, and eventually was liberated at another camp by the U.S. Army.

Burger described his experiences in “The Commando of Counterfeiters,” a 1983 memoir.

A movie based on the book, “The Counterfeiters,” won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007. Burger approved the screenplay.

The Associated Press