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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