Description

England / Germany Operation Bernhard 1938 50-pound note Peppiatt signature Highest denomination and rarest for Peppiatt Operation Bernhard was an operation carried out by Nazi Germany to counterfeit British banknotes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Great Britain in order to trigger the collapse of the British economy during the Second World War. The first phase was carried out at the beginning of 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under the name Unternehmen Andreas (Operation Andreas). The unit succeeded in reproducing the rag paper used by the British, in producing almost identical engraving blocks, and in deducing the algorithm used to create the alphanumeric serial code on each note. The unit was shut down at the beginning of 1942 after its leader, Alfred Naujocks, fell out with his superior, Reinhard Heydrich. The operation was relaunched later in the year; the objective then was to counterfeit money to finance German intelligence operations. Instead of a specialized unit within the SD, prisoners from Nazi concentration camps were selected and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to work under the orders of SS major Bernhard Krüger. The unit produced British banknotes until the middle of 1945; estimates vary as to the number and value of the notes printed, ranging from 132.6 million pounds sterling to 300 million pounds sterling. By the time the unit ceased production, it had perfected the design of US dollars, although the paper and serial numbers were still being analyzed. The counterfeit money was laundered in exchange for money and other goods. The fake notes from the operation were used to pay the Turkish agent Elyesa Bazna - code name Cicero- for his work obtaining British secrets from the British ambassador in Ankara, and 100,000 pounds sterling from Operation Bernhard were used to obtain information that helped free the Italian leader Benito Mussolini during the Gran Sasso raid in September 1943. At the beginning of 1945, the unit was transferred to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, then to the Redl-Zipf tunnel complex and finally to the Ebensee concentration camp. Due to an overly precise interpretation of a German order, the prisoners were not executed on arrival; they were released shortly afterward by the American army. Much of the unit's production was dumped into Lakes Toplitz and Grundlsee at the end of the war, but a sufficient quantity had been put into circulation for the Bank of England to stop issuing new banknotes and issue a new design after the war.