Description

England / Germany Operation Bernhard 1930 50-pound note Catterns signature Highest denomination and rarest for Catterns 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 successfully reproduced the rag paper used by the British, produced nearly identical engraving blocks, and deduced 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 was then to counterfeit money to fund 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 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 to £300 million. By the time the unit ceased production, it had perfected the design of the US dollar, although the paper and serial numbers were still being analyzed. The counterfeit money was laundered in exchange for cash and other goods. The fake notes from the operation were used to pay the Turkish agent Elyesa Bazna - codename Cicero- for his work obtaining British secrets from the British ambassador in Ankara, and £100,000 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 upon arrival; they were freed 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 enough had been put into circulation for the Bank of England to stop issuing new notes and release a new design after the war.