User reviews

I just saw this movie in London last night. There were 5 people in the audience (including myself). What a shame because this was a solid piece of film-making. If you haven't seen The Counterfeiters, go see it. Here's why.

The acting is outstanding all the way through. You will learn more about counterfeiting efforts by the Nazis to undermine the British and Americans. This movie has numerous layers to it, and avoids the typical clichés that all Germans acted one way, and all Jews acted another way. You learn the subtle ways that control over other people is used to manipulate them. Do you put aside your beliefs in order to survive? If so, are you being true to those beliefs? Is it better to be a dead, morally right person or a live, less moral one? These are central themes. Finally, does how we make our wealth matter? These aren't ideas unique to cinema, but the way the movie presents them is.

Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Markovics) is a master counterfeiter, living a life of debauchery in pre-war Berlin, until his luck finally runs out, and he is captured and shipped out to the Mauthausen concentration camp. He witnesses the horrors of camp life; fellow prisoners are beaten, shot, and starved, but Sally, determined to survive, looks out for himself and uses his skills as an artist to secure a more comfortable lifestyle during his incarceration. After taking advantage of his talents, his superiors transfer him to Sachsenhausen, where he is to oversee the largest counterfeiting operation in history.

Here, Sally is provided with all the men and equipment he needs to crack the pound and the dollar; his criminal enterprises are now government funded. The price of failure is made clear, but the counterfeiters are also wary of the price of success, as once the currencies have been cracked, they will be surplus to requirements; their lives depend not only on their successes but also their failures.

This is where Burger (Diehl), the film's moral centre, comes into play. Unlike Sally, he sees the bigger picture, struggling to come to terms with the fact that while his work keeps him alive, it helps the Nazi war effort. Neither can he reconcile himself with the fact that while he lives in relative comfort other detainees, including his wife and children, live in squalor.

These moral dilemmas form the basis of the film, and in the face of the horrors of camp life, Sally tries to shrug them off with De Niro squints and smiles; the maxim that one must look after oneself is one repeated throughout the film. It's a very interesting idea, and it's one that is presented very well, both in terms of style and performance. The camera-work captures the bleak setting effectively, and the lead performances are uniformly excellent, but the use of tango for the score is inspired. The contrast between the music and the images adeptly complement the film's complicated moral tone. There is also a surprising amount of humour; while the bigger picture is indeed bleak, there are moments of comedy, and even if it is laughter in the dark, it is welcome and helps not only to carry the film along but humanise it and its characters.

The Counterfeiters is a very enjoyable film, which isn't something that can be said for many World War II "true stories". Its interesting exploration of adaptation and survival under extreme circumstances makes for an engaging story, and one that is definitely worth seeking out.

This is the rare - and by that I REALLY mean rare! - case of an Austrian movie being able to bear comparison with international competition. "Die Fälscher" is a well-made and touching movie about the Holocaust and a special division of Jews in a concentration camp that survived by counterfeiting money (or pretending to do so) for the Nazis. Karl Markovics is the shining light of the cast. Who thought that the guy who came to greater popularity by starring in "Kommissar Rex" would end up getting roles like this one and playing them to perfection? August Diehl is good, too, but he comes across as a bit too dramatic at times. The Nazis - and that's the only weakness of Stefan Ruzowitzky's movie - are the way they always are. Ruthless, cruel, craven and at the same time stupid pigs who do everything to humiliate the Jews at any time. Even though, that is probably the way 99% of them really were, it would have been more interesting to get a differentiated view on some of them.

While "Die Fälscher" may not reinvent the wheel, it is a pretty great movie. And although it's typical that Hollywood would pick only a Holocaust-story from Austria as an Oscar contender, it is exciting as hell for a movie from this country to get a nomination. I really hope that Stefan Ruzowitzky will get the award, because his movie deserves it and it could help the Austrian film industry to finally get momentum again.

I thought the film was excellent on a number of grounds; the acting by the main players was uniformly good,I suppose one could carp about the main Nazi in that it was the traditional mixture of ' jolly fine fellow when out of uniform and with blonde wife and children but nightmare when faced with the Untermenschen in the camp'. The main actor was unknown to me and something of an anti-hero but the gradual emergence of his positive sides was well done.The concentration on life in the special part of the camp where only the sounds of shouts and gunshots penetrate was very well portrayed and the entire film gripped me from start to finish. I suppose there were no amazing revelations apart from the basis of the story but that was more than enough and I recommend it highly

This is about the Nazis, trying to produce false pounds and dollars in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. The aim is to destroy the British and American economies. For this purpose, they use Jewish experts, who have their privileges, like clean sheets, classical music, showers and the possibility of not being murdered.

It could have been just another Nazi movie, but many ethic questions are raised. What is treason and can you possibly survive without it? The drama between the Hauptsturmführer and the main character, Sally, is described in an interesting way, not at least because of the brilliant acting from Karl Marcovics.

Being in concentration camp, are there any more questions than surviving the next day? Obviously there were.

The power in this film is that the action and dialogue is understated. We're not subjected to the full visual horrors of life in the concentration camps yet we feel what it was like nevertheless. The main characters' problem in reconciling the differences between being incarcerated in a 'normal' gaol along with 'normal' criminals and their 'code of conduct' - and the imprisonment and abuse of 'normal' citizens is an ever present theme that is conveyed with complete mastery by the script writer, actors and director. An incredible film of enduring merit. The gaunt features of the actors seemed tailor made for this instructive entertainment.

I came away with a moral dilemma of my own: though "The Counterfeiters" is excellent in places in others it is not.

The true story of Operation Bernhard and the printing of millions of pounds is a fascinating story. The direction, acting, and script are excellent. But my problem was one that for me was a real shock: I was not as moved by the film as I had hoped or wanted to be.

Dealing with the most singular piece of evil devised by man - genocide, especially in the concentration camps is never an easy subject, and perhaps the fact that it is not overplayed is a bonus - however, I came away admiring the film and its performances but left curiously unmoved by the overall tone of the piece.

Perhaps that's the point of the moral dichotomy (Make money, help the Nazis, don't make money, lose your lives but shorten the war) that is does not scream but rather affects us quietly.

Overall, definitely watchable. But misses greatness.

I don't go to the cinema much these days. Even sitting through the previews before I saw this I was beyond bored, even though Meryl Streep was in two of them, even she's in boring rubbish these days.

But, 'The Counterfeiters' is classy stuff. The Austrians (as well as The Germans) are excellent at making period films (masters at detail) & when they handle the subject of The Holocaust, the few things I've seen, have been superb.

Everyone's good in this. The lead is hypnotic.

If the subject of The Holocaust interests you, don't hesitate seeing this. It's a very good film indeed. It's nice to see something brand new that you can confidently call a classic.

Be prepared that this is not a bum bum war movie but another interesting film that touched my feelings. The first scene begins on the dreamingly beach of Nice in South of France where I am going always jogging with my wife in my holidays. Then it dives directly in the second world war time telling how the Jewish people were kept and murdered by the Nazis. DIE FÄLSCHER shows how high talented Jewish forgers have been forced by the SS to work with them. I have now a better view about the development of the German machinery. The movie is well directed with a fast pace and full of turns and twists that led to the Oscar as best foreign film of this year. I have never got bored and I liked it.

There have been several respectable productions in the last years about the holocaust as for example THE PIANIST, BLACK BOOK, DER UNTERGANG, DIE LETZTEN TAGE DER SOPHIE SCHOLL or DER LETZTE ZUG. Read for all these mentioned movies my reviews.

Final vote 7/10 and another important DVD for my best of collection.

THE GOOD - Here we have a story of Jews "enlisted" to help the Nazis win the war by counterfeiting foreign currency. Basically, if they do their job and shut up they will be dealt, a bit of a better hand than their brethren without their unique counterfeiting skills. Sometimes one has to stand on principle rather than survival and that's what is reverberated for me throughout this movie. There is opposing forces, infighting, but eventually thanks to the men efforts who delayed counterfeiting foreign currency, they contributed to the downfall of the Nazis in their own little way. And doing it under Nazi duress makes for an all-around classic story. Everything is connected and all holds well, we know how the movie will end from the time it opens but the journey to get to that place is often the hardest part. What am I talking about? Give the movie a watch to find out. But first read…

THE QUESTIONABLE parts of this film... to some there is a blur of what is good and right in the movie and the end leaves you questioning this. If you are the type who is a goody toe-shoes and likes a good moral ending you may find this one not up your alley, as it ends in a gray area when it comes to morality.

THE BAD - I mean not much. This felt like a full story. I felt the creative team behind the movie maxed out the direction they was going. The bad part of the film will be the questionable part to some. Also, character development and back story could have been better if you wish to knit pick.

WHY only a 7/10 IMDb style or a regular to high 3 out of 4 stars. It just felt like the story was in that critical range. You won't be disappointed if you watch "The Counterfeiters".

It was clear from the first few minutes of the film that the protagonist (Solly) survived his death camp experience. The scene is the immediate aftermath of WWII and Solly checks into a casino hotel in Monte Carlo, along with a suitcase of US Currency. After a brief encounter with a woman he picked up in the casino, the scene flashes back to pre WWII in Berlin, where Solly is a successful counterfeiter, eagerly sought after for his skills in forging identity documents for Jews seeking to flee Nazi Germany.

Solly is also Jewish, but feels he is clever enough to elude the coming storm. Eventually he is betrayed by a rival and ends up in a concentration camp. However, his counterfeiting skills help him escape the gas chambers. The Nazis plan is to undermine US & British currency through a massive counterfeiting project & Solly (among other fellow Jewish concentration camp inmates) is recruited to lead the effort.

The moral dilemma of the Jewish prisoner's ability to survive by helping the murderers of their fellow Jews weighs heavily with Solly and his associates. The movie does an excellent job of portraying the dynamics of the issue, from the different perspectives, namely the prisoners who want to survive by actively participating in the counterfeiting project, and those who would rather die by sabotaging it.

As the leader of the counterfeiters, Solly needs to walk a fine line between following his own instincts to survive, and respecting the imperatives of those who want to sabotage the project, ensuring the death of the entire group.

There are many films that touch on the narrative of the holocaust victim compromising one's own moral outlook in order to survive. "The Pianist" & "Fateless" are two recent critically acclaimed films that explored this territory. I would rate "The Counterfeiter" superior to both of these excellent films.

This was an outstanding film, and I recommend it highly.

Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch is an expert counterfeiter whose luck runs out when he overrules his survival instinct for one more roll in the sack. Unfortunately for him, this is 1930s Germany and he will serve his time in a concentration camp rather than prison. Sally, however, treats them as one and the same, and it is his prison code of working an angle while giving others their place that sees him survive, and flourish, if such a term fits the meagre circumstances.

Prison code also means never snitching, and it is this dilemma that will decide his fate.

Based on a true story, The Counterfeiters leans more towards prison drama than out-and-out Holocaust movie. The horrors of the camps intrudes only occasionally - that is the guilt-ridden dilemma of these prisoners - and mostly off-screen, as when the god-forsaken 'shoe squad' march next door, and we witness one of them being executed only by virtue of the bullets that ricochet through the fence and endanger the precious forgery team. There is division in the ranks of the Jew forgers, between those who want to survive and those who want to sabotage the war effort. As the war draws to a close, their aims slowly converge.

Karl Markovics excels as street-wise habitual criminal Sally. He scoffs at left-wing ideologue Burger, believing his jailbird instincts will get him through this ordeal. The wake-up call comes when he is cleaning the latrine, on his knees, and Hauptscharführer Holst, the camp's chief sadist, let's him know in no uncertain terms how he regards his contribution to the war effort, and indeed his very humanity.

The film bookends its opening and closing with Sally in Monaco, having survived the war, ready to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. Needless to say, the monetary gain soon loses its allure.

Well acted, technically excellent, The Counterfieters entertains rather than provokes thought, but is worth viewing nonetheless.

In 1936, the greatest forger in Germany, the Jewish Russian Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), is arrested by the agent Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow) and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. Years later, he is transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp to work with a group of professionals counterfeiting sterling pounds under the command of Herzog in the Operation Bernhard. When the group is ordered to produce American dollars, the idealistic Adolf Burger (August Diehl) sabotages the work of Sally and his team.

"Die Fälscher" is based on a true story of a group of Jews that are forced to counterfeit currency to destabilize the economy of England and North America in World War II. The realistic plot discloses a fight between the idealism of Burger and the intention of surviving the war of the group of Jews led by Sally in excellent performances. The result is another great and powerful German film that leaves an open question: what could you do or how far would you go to survive? My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Os Falsários" ("The Forgers")

Atze (Veit Stübner): "Warum ist Gott nicht in Auschwitz? Der kam nicht durch die Selektion!"

Die Fälscher is one of my favorite movies about the Holocaust. It's an Austrian film where the Nazi pigs bark in German (not English) and the victims speak, cry and pray in German, Russian, and Hebrew (not English). I can't stand the Holocaust movies where the Nazis speak English with a German accent, no matter how good the movie is. That goes for Schindler's List and many others (the only exception is probably The Pianist, an excellent film that if it were in Polish and German would be a real masterpiece).

In Die Fälscher one can really breath the brutality of the small Nazi concentration camps (there are no extermination camps shown here). Viktor Frankl wrote that in the ordinary small concentration camps most of the extermination took place. In Die Fälscher we see a Nazi pig kicking to death a prisoner in Buchenwald and we see how little life was worth in Sachsenhausen (you could be shot any time and for no reason). The elegant and cultivated German Nazis could kill and torture as much as they felt like.

The film focuses on the biggest con operation of the entire history: Operation Bernhard. Operation Bernhard managed to counterfeit more than 134 million British pounds and some American dollars. Created in 1942 by the Nazi Germans and developed in Sachsenhausen's Blocks 18 and 19 by 142 Jewish prisoners who were forced to forge millions, Operation Bernhard could have given a dramatic turn to the war. The Nazis counterfeited not only British pounds and American dollars, but also many passports, identity cards, birth and marriage certificates, other official documents, and stamps. The Nazis were not only cruel and monstrous (we know that they loved to gas men, women, and children, and that they enjoyed massacring people and burning babies alive), but they were also great thieves (they stole many Aryan-looking Polish children – after having killed their parents, of course–) and they were also the greatest common criminals: they organized the biggest con operation of all times (but, luckily, too late). The Nazi Germans possessed all of the disgusting and lowest attributes that a human can have: racism, violence, cruelty, and dishonesty. And all that beautiful pack came from one of the most cultivated countries of the entire world. The Germans, with their amazing philosophy, their amazing poetry, their amazing music and their amazing art produced the most horrific monstrosity of human history: the Holocaust.

Die Fälscher is loosely based on the memoirs of Adolf Burger, originally written in Czech (Komando padělatelů) and first published in 1983. The translation into English was published only 26 years later (in 2009) under the title The Devil's Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation (I didn't read the book, but I just ordered it). Burger was a Jewish Slovak typographer and Holocaust survivor born in 1917. He was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau together with his wife when he was 25 years old, in 1942. At that time he was making fake baptism certificates to save Jews. In Auschwitz-Birkenau he was tattooed with the number 64401. His wife perished in Auschwitz that year. He survived 18 months in Auschwitz-Birkenau and was then transferred to Sachsenhausen (April 1944) to work in Operation Bernhard. In 1945 he was transferred to the Ebensee concentration camp (a camp within the Mauthausen network) until its liberation by the US Army on May 6, 1945 (that isn't shown in the movie). Burger died 10 months ago in Prague, age 99 (yes, 99!), in December 2016.

The casting of the film is superb. Karl Markovics (who portrays Sorowitsch, a character based on the real Salomon Smolianoff, an Ukrainian Jewish professional counterfeiter who died in Brazil at age 76) gives an outstanding performance. I really love this actor. He's amazing. August Diehl (the famous SS whom Fassbender blew his balls off in Inglourious Basterds) plays the real Burger. He appears super thin and his performance is stunning. Sebastian Urzendowsky plays Kolya, a young Russian painter also involved in Operation Bernhard. His performance is breathtaking (Urzendowsky gave an impressive performance too in the German film Berlin'36). Devid Striesow plays the Nazi Herzog, to my taste a too nice and soft character. Herzog is based on the real Bernhard Krüger, a murderous SS who led Operation Bernhard (the operation was named after him). As the vast majority of German and Austrian murderers, Krüger got off scot-free (after a brief period of detention) and died peacefully in Germany at age 84. Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter (Dolores Chaplin) makes a small appearance in the film.

The tango music of the film (written by Marius Ruhland) is truly amazing. The details of the film are really painful and really well made: the apple, the bloody hands, the second hand clothing, the touching of the clean bed sheets, the reaction of Kolya at the beginning of the shower, the huge humiliation in the toilet, the walking-corps after the liberation of Sachsenhausen

Around 134 million counterfeit British pounds were produced at Sachsenhausen. In 1945 Operation Bernhard moved to Mauthausen. In 1959 some of the boxes with counterfeit British pounds were discovered at the bottom of Lake Toplitz (in the Austrian Alps), and in 2000 the same company who discovered the Titanic pull out from the lake many boxes with counterfeit British pounds and some counterfeit American dollars.

Die Fälscher won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language (Austria). After it won the Oscar, Burger said that he felt happy because now more people would see the movie and will know that the Nazis were not just murderers but also common criminals.

The worst: some small factual errors.

The best: everything else.