Money makes the war go on in Stefan Ruzowitzky’s 2008 Oscar winner Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), which tells the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis -- using concentration camp labour -- to weaken the enemy’s economy.

Though not as emotionally resonant as other recent German-language films with similar settings, Die Fälscher does dig deeper into questions related to choice, survival and martyrdom -- and does so with greater clarity -- than any of its predecessors. Perhaps a tad too cerebral to be emotionally resonant, the film is nevertheless a very well-mounted and acted production that treats its themes with considerable depth.

The film opens with a prologue that combines two scenes. The first is set in immediate post-war Monte Carlo, where a rich man spends a fortune on gambling and expensive hotels. A girl he seduces is shocked to discover a number tattooed on his arm: the sign of an Auschwitz survivor. The second scene shows the same man, now identified as Salomin "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) in a nightclub in 1936 Berlin, where a woman walks away from him in disgust when she discovers he is a Jew. "She might come back to spew out the champagne," he says of the drink he just offered her. "It was Rothschild".

Sally was a gifted artist who turned to counterfeiting for the money: "Why make money with art when you can make money making money?" he says. But being a criminal and a Jew in the Nazi-era means Sally ends up in a concentration camp, though because of his exceptional skills he is soon transferred to another camp where beds are a bit softer, Sundays are off and food is more plentiful. He works on the Operation Bernhard, which is set up to flood the economies of the UK and the US with false money in order to fatally weaken their war economies and thus aid the German war effort.

Based on real events, the film opposes Sally, the charmer who believes Jews should adapt to survive (and who sees an opportunity to perfect his dollar and perhaps forget about war troubles by doing what he does best), and Adolf Burger (August Diehl), another Jewish concentration camp detainee who is a printing expert also working on Operation Bernhard and whose wife is still stuck in Auschwitz. Adolf refuses to use his skills for Nazi profit and would like to do something to stop Operation Bernhard's aid to the war effort, even something drastic, while Sally’s view is that every day lived is another one gained, even if their work aids the Nazis.

In the film’s screenplay, adapted by the director from the Adolf Burger memoirs Des Teufels Werkstatt ("The Devil’s Workshop"), the direct question is not anymore one of survival of the body, but one of the soul: to which extent can a person be held responsible for actions committed under threat of severe sanctions or death? Can one allow oneself to live if it makes others, even unknowns, die? Would a sacrifice be worthwhile or would martyrdom be in vain?...... European-films.net

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