Table Tennis with an SS Man

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There are not very many people who could say that they have played table tennis with an SS man in a concentration camp and moreover, that they have defeated him. Yet Adolf Burger, who was one of the few prominent prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, has exactly this experience. Mr. Burger recalls: “That SS man wanted to play just with me, because the other ones would always let him win. He played badly, whereas I played well.” The group r of prominent prisoners was located in the completely isolated blocks 18 and 19. These prisoners were Jews from all over Europe and they had special advantages such as sufficient amount of food or better work that was not so demanding. However, all this was paid with the knowledge of certain death. These prisoners were members of the so called counterfeiting commando. They were the best of the best. They were tasked with forging American dollars and British pounds. The Nazis needed to weaken the currencies of the Allies and they also wanted to do other financial manoeuvres. The members of the commando tried to sabotage the otherwise successful process of counterfeiting, and to a certain degree they succeeded.

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Adolf Burger

Mr. Adolf Burger was born in 1917 in Velka Lomnice town in Poprad region. He comes from a Jewish family. During his youth he was a member of the Haschomer Hacair Jewish organization and later, as adult, was a chairman of this association for short time. He is an educated compositor. After the school he shortly worked as a builder and during the years 1937 and 1939 he served in the Czechoslovak army. When the war began he was already working as a compositor in Bratislava town in Slovakia. He participated here in a secret resistance group of young communists. The main task of this group was saving the Slovakian Jews from being transported. Mr., Burger’s part was to print fake birth certificates. In August 1942, the whole association was revealed and Mr. Burger with his wife Gisele were arrested and transported to theAuschwitz concentration camp. The twenty two years old Gisele didn’t survived the camp.Mr. Adolf Burger, who survived the "Auschwitz hell“, has been called up to Sachsenhausen in Germany as a compositor in 1944. Together with another 130 prisoners he participated in the biggest counterfeiter operation in the history, started by the Nazi Germany in order to weaken the British currency and for their own financial plotting. Thanks to disordered and confused SS officers at the end of the war most of the counterfeiters came to liberalization after all. Regarding the original plan the whole group involved in this operation was supposed to be killed. After the liberalization of the Ebensee concentration camp, with a borrowed camera Mr. Burger provided documentation of the Nazi barbarities which was later used in his first publicized edition (1945) about concentration camps. Twenty years after the end of the war he started to work as a journalist and publicized the complete counterfeiter operation in a book called Des Teufels Werkstatt (The Evil’s Workshop). He remains active up to these days visiting Germany where he lectures at high schools and talks with students about the holocaust. An Austrian-German movie has been released in 2007 named Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters). This movie has been inspired by Mr. Burger’s book and won the Oscar for the best international movie.

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Sachsenhausen

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Camp, not far from Berlin, originally designated for political opponents and regime-inconvenient groups of people. Most of the prisoners were assigned slave´s work, between the most feared testing boots for Wehrmacht when the prisoners had to run up to forty kilometres with bags filled with sand. Despite it was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, there were mass murders, for example about 10 thousand Soviet refugees died in 1941. Many prisoners died during the so called “medical” experiments, and while testing the gas chambers with Cyclone A. In Sachsenhausen there died at least 20 thousand people. Between the imprisoned there were also Czechoslovaks, for example writer and painter Josef Čapek or 1200 students arrested on the anti-Nazi demonstrations in October and November 1939. But in Sachsenhausen there were also counterfeit squads based in barracks number eighteen and nineteen. These blocks were closely guarded and even the commanding officers could not go in. The prisoners of this squad had a prominent status, they had enough food and they could have parties. They did not work with other prisoners, their classification was secret and their job was to counterfeit pounds and dollars.