Starring: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Category: IIB
It might be mostly set in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but The Counterfeiters begins in Monte Carlo: the film's protagonist, Sally Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), is seen arriving in Monaco after the war's end, his suitcase full of cash, which he duly lavishes on the casinos and nightspots, and then heads off to his room with a woman he has just met. It's in bed that she discovers a tattoo on his arm - the number to which he was assigned back in the camp - and the story flashes back to the past.
Based on the real events of Operation Bernhard, an ill-fated project through which Nazi Germany produced a well of fake pound sterling banknotes with a team recruited from camp inmates, Stefan Ruzowitzky's take is adapted from the memoirs of Adolf Burger, a typographer who was forcibly drafted into the team. That the Austrian filmmaker elects to make the fictional Sorowitsch (above right) his central character - and starts with the man's life as a big spender, albeit one tinged with melancholia - is testament to the story's underlying theme: how one survives when forced to compromise for survival.
While Burger (played by August Diehl in the film) represents one take on the moral dilemma - someone whose ideals are slowly usurped by harsh reality - Sorowitsch provides his mirror image, a crook and con man who regains his dignity bit by bit under Nazi tyranny as he casts aside his intuition for self-preservation to save his fellow inmates (Burger included) from being taken to task (and death row) by their supervisor, the sneaky but hardly monstrous Herzog (Devid Striesow).
