The Dead on Holiday

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There were two strictly classified blocks in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, namely the blocks 18 and 19. There worked the so called counterfeiting commando. It consisted of 142 Jewish prisoners from all over Europe. They had to be Jewish because none of them was meant to survive the end of the war. The entire operation was named after its commander Bernhard Krüger and thus called the Bernhard Operation. The prisoners were assigned work by the commander of the commando personally. The commander was aided by the head of the special SS unit for the blocks 18 and 19, SS-Hauptscharführer Kurt Werner. Among the members of this secret commando was also Adolf Burger. “We had everything there. We were like some dead people on holiday. Yes, it was like being on holiday. We had as much food as we wanted. We listened to music, we had good beds; we had everything. We even had a common room where we played cards and chess and we were allowed to listen to the radio.” The moment someone got ill, he was executed, even if the illness was curable. Other members could have gotten infected and the operation endangered and such a scenario had to be avoided at all costs. The commando was tasked with forging travel documents for the Nazi secret service and also with forging British pounds. Adolf Burger continues: “When I sat on the bed in the evening, I knew that I was dead – the entire time. Not even the head of the camp was allowed to enter our blocks. Everyone who knew this secret had to die.”

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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

Available in: English | Česky

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.