Enabling Survival
What could possibly be more atrocious than being forced to assist in the plans of an organization that has singled you out - along with all others who share your ethnicity, religion, heritage, traditions and culture - for death. Being forced by circumstances well beyond your control, to utilize your experience and expertise to assist that agency in its diabolical plans to wreak havoc on the economies of the very countries that you know are battling the one that holds you prisoner.
When the alternative is death, one supposes most people would resign themselves to doing what is demanded of them. Particularly when you know that passively doing as your captors demand of you delays your inevitable death. But what bitterness, to be fully aware that other Jews, simply because they are Jews; children of every age group, women, the elderly and the frail have all been marked by this odiously anti-human plan for mass annihilation, and you find yourself assenting to assist their murderers.
So it was with Adolf Burger, then a young man of 25, sent to Auschwitz by the fascist German regime, during the Second world War. Altogether he spent three years in four concentration camps, and managed to survive his ordeal where millions of others did not. Can he be faulted for desperately attempting to prolong his life? It is instinctual in every human organism; to survive. Everyone there did, in fact, struggle to survive, although it availed them little, and they perished in unforgettable numbers.
The tattoo impressed on his left forearm represented the fact that he was the 64,401st individual to be welcomed at the Auschwitz death camp. He was sent there, along with his 22-year-old wife, and she perished there. Then he was transferred to Birkenau, and later to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And it was there that he, along with other inmates whose professions were typesetting, printing, engraving, banking and counterfeiting had been assembled.
For a most particular purpose; to produce banknotes for the Third Reich, which had developed a plan to destabilize the British wartime economy through flooding the country with counterfeit five, ten, twenty and fifty-pound notes. These professionals, isolated from the rest of the camp inmates in sealed-off huts were provided with precision machinery and ordered to produce perfect forgeries, under pain of death.
Mr. Burger was originally from Slovakia where, when Josef Tiso the president, decreed that all Slovakian Jews would be deported to Germany and he responded by forging baptism certificates to enable Jews to pose as Christians, before he was finally arrested. The production facility at Sachsenhausen was a high state secret and none of the other camp occupants had any idea what was going on there. The curious who attempted to discover the purpose of isolated huts and the workers there, were summarily executed.
Eventually 130-million pounds of quality forgeries resulted, but by then the war was winding up. The few counterfeit pound notes that did make their way into Britain confounded the Bank of England by their quality, causing them to withdraw all notes larger than five-pound notes from circulation for the following twenty years. This footnote in history was recently revealed by the publishing of Mr. Burger's autobiography, The Devil's Workshop.
Mr. Burger's publishing of the events that took place during his concentration camp incarceration and forced complicity with Nazi plans were dictated, he said, by his determination that "I don't want anyone ever to forget what happened, or to diminish what went on there". The intention of the Nazis was to kill all of the prisoners before the Mauthausen camp - where the forging operations were moved to, with the advance of the Allies - was liberated.
The lives of those concentration camp survivors were saved simply by the speed of the Allies in advancing toward the camps, to liberate them. The Nazis had time only to order prisoners to dump the printing equipment into Lake Toplitz, along with cases of forged banknotes. In 2000, divers in a salvage operation brought bundles of banknotes to the surface of the lake, under Mr. Burger's direction.
Mr. Burger returned to Prague post-war to discover his parents had died in concentration camps. In Prague he continued working as a printer until his Jewishness caused him to be fired. The scourge of anti-Semitism that had been advanced to such a fine art of degradation and annihilation, lived on and continues to do so, beyond the failure of the Third Reich.
When the alternative is death, one supposes most people would resign themselves to doing what is demanded of them. Particularly when you know that passively doing as your captors demand of you delays your inevitable death. But what bitterness, to be fully aware that other Jews, simply because they are Jews; children of every age group, women, the elderly and the frail have all been marked by this odiously anti-human plan for mass annihilation, and you find yourself assenting to assist their murderers.
So it was with Adolf Burger, then a young man of 25, sent to Auschwitz by the fascist German regime, during the Second world War. Altogether he spent three years in four concentration camps, and managed to survive his ordeal where millions of others did not. Can he be faulted for desperately attempting to prolong his life? It is instinctual in every human organism; to survive. Everyone there did, in fact, struggle to survive, although it availed them little, and they perished in unforgettable numbers.
The tattoo impressed on his left forearm represented the fact that he was the 64,401st individual to be welcomed at the Auschwitz death camp. He was sent there, along with his 22-year-old wife, and she perished there. Then he was transferred to Birkenau, and later to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And it was there that he, along with other inmates whose professions were typesetting, printing, engraving, banking and counterfeiting had been assembled.
For a most particular purpose; to produce banknotes for the Third Reich, which had developed a plan to destabilize the British wartime economy through flooding the country with counterfeit five, ten, twenty and fifty-pound notes. These professionals, isolated from the rest of the camp inmates in sealed-off huts were provided with precision machinery and ordered to produce perfect forgeries, under pain of death.
Mr. Burger was originally from Slovakia where, when Josef Tiso the president, decreed that all Slovakian Jews would be deported to Germany and he responded by forging baptism certificates to enable Jews to pose as Christians, before he was finally arrested. The production facility at Sachsenhausen was a high state secret and none of the other camp occupants had any idea what was going on there. The curious who attempted to discover the purpose of isolated huts and the workers there, were summarily executed.
Eventually 130-million pounds of quality forgeries resulted, but by then the war was winding up. The few counterfeit pound notes that did make their way into Britain confounded the Bank of England by their quality, causing them to withdraw all notes larger than five-pound notes from circulation for the following twenty years. This footnote in history was recently revealed by the publishing of Mr. Burger's autobiography, The Devil's Workshop.
Mr. Burger's publishing of the events that took place during his concentration camp incarceration and forced complicity with Nazi plans were dictated, he said, by his determination that "I don't want anyone ever to forget what happened, or to diminish what went on there". The intention of the Nazis was to kill all of the prisoners before the Mauthausen camp - where the forging operations were moved to, with the advance of the Allies - was liberated.
The lives of those concentration camp survivors were saved simply by the speed of the Allies in advancing toward the camps, to liberate them. The Nazis had time only to order prisoners to dump the printing equipment into Lake Toplitz, along with cases of forged banknotes. In 2000, divers in a salvage operation brought bundles of banknotes to the surface of the lake, under Mr. Burger's direction.
Mr. Burger returned to Prague post-war to discover his parents had died in concentration camps. In Prague he continued working as a printer until his Jewishness caused him to be fired. The scourge of anti-Semitism that had been advanced to such a fine art of degradation and annihilation, lived on and continues to do so, beyond the failure of the Third Reich.
Labels: Human Relations, Realities, societal failures
posted by Pieface @ 5:14 PM
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