But these are not prisoners!

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The members of the so called counterfeiting commando were supposed to be executed in the adits of the Ebensee concentration camp towards the end of the Second World War, since they were tasked with secret operations such as providing the Nazis with forged American dollars, British pounds and other documents. Yet the chaos prevailing towards the end of the war, as well as efforts of Austrian partisans thwarted the Nazi plan to transport prominent prisoners to the Ebensee concentration camp. On May 5, 1945, at 10:30 a.m., the Ebensee concentration camp was already controlled by the prisoners who were awaiting the arrival of American troops. The counterfeiting commando was thus handed over by the SS soldiers to the administration of the already liberated camp. Adolf Burger recalls how the camp administration was reluctant to accept the members of the counterfeiting commando: “The SS man who guarded us reported: ‘I am handing over 120 prisoners.’ But the commander of the liberated camp objected: ‘What? These are prisoners?’ Because we had hair, we looked healthy, and we wore shoes; no prisoners ever looked like us. So he told our guard: ‘But these are not prisoners. Who are these people?’ At that point we jumped up and ran to the armed prisoner who was guarding the camp and we showed him our sleeves: ‘Look, we have numbers, we are from Auschwitz, we were the special commando from Sachsenhausen, let us in.’ When the commander of the liberated camp saw that he ordered them to let us in. That was on May 5, at 10:30 a.m. And we ran so that he would not change his mind. We ran all the way to the end of the camp. So was my liberation, although the Americans were not there yet.”

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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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Ebensee

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The Ebensee concentration camp was established in 1943. It was part of the complex of concentration camps in Mauthausen. The inmates were employed for the construction of underground structures and underground factories. The accelerated construction of KZ Ebensee resulted in a particularly high number of casualties. The administration of the numerous subsidiary camps was so demanding that the concentration camp in Mauthausen increasingly took over the role of the administrative center. The inmates from the camp were posted and sent to work in the subsidiary camps. At the same time, those who were sick and incapable of any more work were sent back to the concentration camp Mauthausen, where they died. Of the more than 84,000 people imprisoned in the complex of the Mauthausen camps in March 1945, some 65,000 were located in the subsidiary camps. The inmates were used as slave laborers for the construction of production sites or directly in the production by firms like Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG, Reichswerke Hermann Göring, The Heinkel Works and the Messerschmitt-Werke company, specialized in the production of aircraft.

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But these are not prisoners!

Adolf Burger