Adolf Burger (12 August 1917 – 6 December 2016) was a Slovak
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
typographer, memoir writer, and
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
survivor involved in
Operation Bernhard
Operation Bernhard was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy
The economy of the United Kingdom is a highly developed soci ...
. The film
''The Counterfeiters'', based largely on his memoirs, won the 2007
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (known as Best Foreign Language Film prior to 2020) is one of the Academy Awards handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given to a ...
.
[
]
Life
Adolf Burger was born to a Jewish family in Kakaslomnic, then a mostly ethnic German
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, pop3 = 157,000
3,322,405
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village in the High Tatras
The High Tatras or High Tatra Mountains ( Slovak: Vysoké Tatry; pl, Tatry Wysokie; rue, Высокі Татри,'' Vysoki Tatry''; hu, Magas-Tátra; german: Hohe Tatra; french: Hautes Tatras), are a mountain range along the border of norther ...
region, Spiš County. His father died when Adolf was 4½, after which his mother, four siblings, and two grandparents moved to the nearby town of Poprad
Poprad (; hu, Poprád; german: Deutschendorf) is a city in northern Slovakia at the foot of the High Tatra Mountains, famous for its picturesque historic centre and as a holiday resort. It is the biggest town of the Spiš region and the ten ...
. He entered apprenticeship with a local printer and typesetter at the age of fourteen. His mother remarried a Christian, which gave her the status of a non-Jew in Slovakia
Slovakia (; sk, Slovensko ), officially the Slovak Republic ( sk, Slovenská republika, links=no ), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the s ...
after the introduction of anti-Jewish laws
Anti-Jewish laws have been a common occurrence throughout Jewish history. Examples of such laws include special Jewish quotas, Jewish taxes and Jewish "disabilities".
Some were adopted in the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy an ...
by the beginning of World War II. The organization Hashomer Hatzair
Hashomer Hatzair ( he, הַשׁוֹמֵר הַצָעִיר, , ''The Young Guard'') is a Labor Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement founded in 1913 in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary, and it was also the name of the group ...
helped Burger's siblings to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine British Mandate of Palestine or Palestine Mandate most often refers to:
* Mandate for Palestine: a League of Nations mandate under which the British controlled an area which included Mandatory Palestine and the Emirate of Transjordan.
* Mandatory P ...
before Adolf Hitler's
Adolf (also spelt Adolph or Adolphe, Adolfo and when Latinised Adolphus) is a given name used in German-speaking countries, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Flanders, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and to a lesser extent in vari ...
plan to exterminate the Jews materialized.
Adolf Burger did not join them and took up a job in a printing house in Bratislava
Bratislava (, also ; ; german: Preßburg/Pressburg ; hu, Pozsony) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Slovakia. Officially, the population of the city is about 475,000; however, it is estimated to be more than 660,000 — approxim ...
in 1938. During World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, before Slovakia
Slovakia (; sk, Slovensko ), officially the Slovak Republic ( sk, Slovenská republika, links=no ), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the s ...
started to deport its Jewish citizens to German concentration camps in 1942, he became one of those who received government-sponsored waivers from deportations as someone with skills indispensable for the country's economy. At the request of resistance members, Burger began to print false baptismal certificates for Jews scheduled for deportation, which stated that they had been Roman Catholic from birth, or baptized so before World War II. Slovaks with such documents were not deported.
Burger's activity was discovered. He was arrested on 11 August 1942, seven months after his marriage to his wife Gizela. Following his arrest, the couple were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
where Gizela was killed later that year. He was assigned to work at the new arrivals selection ramps.
After eighteen months at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
, Burger's training came through for him once more. He was selected for Operation Bernhard
Operation Bernhard was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy
The economy of the United Kingdom is a highly developed soci ...
, transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners ...
in April 1944, and eventually to the Ebensee
Ebensee am Traunsee (Central Bavarian: ''Emsee'') is a market town in the Traunviertel region of the Austrian state of Upper Austria, located within the Salzkammergut Mountains at the southern end of the Traunsee. The regional capital Linz lies ...
site of the Mauthausen
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen (roughly east of Linz), Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern German ...
camp network where he was liberated by the US Army on 6 May 1945.
Upon returning to the place of his mother's residence at Poprad, Burger found out that, although exempt from deportation by Slovak law, she and his Christian stepfather had only months earlier been deported and killed. The application of the law changed when the German military took control of his country after the failed uprising of 1944. He then settled in Prague
Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...
where he reconfirmed his membership in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1933, was made director of a consortium of printing houses, remarried, and had three children. He was harassed by the secret police during the Communist purges of the early 1950s. He later worked in a shipyard, headed a department in Prague's municipal services, and became director of the city-sponsored taxicabs.
He died on 6 December 2016 at the age of 99.
Operation Bernhard memoirs
Burger's manuscripts were written in a mixture of Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
*Czech, ...
and Slovak, and adjusted by editors for publication in standard Czech. Versions of his memoirs were reedited and republished several times in a variety of languages (including German, Hungarian, Persian, and Slovak) and under modified titles.
His experiences as a currency counterfeiter working on a secret Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
project in a German concentration camp were first made public in 1945 under the title ''Number 64401 Speaks'' (''Číslo 64401 mluví'') written by Sylva and Oskar Krejčí, who based their book on Burger's narrated recollections and included the photographs of the former prisoners he was able to take immediately after liberation. Adolf Burger began to rewrite his memoirs himself in the 1970s. He explained his motivation in an interview:
When I was liberated by the Americans I went home very calmly, never had a bad dream ..For years I was silent, I didn't want to speak about this any more. It was only when the neo-Nazis started with their lies about Auschwitz that I began ..
His memoirs were published in 1983 as ''The Commando of Counterfeiters'' (simultaneously in Czech ''Komando padělatelů'' and in a Slovak translation ''Komando falšovateľov''), which was translated and published in East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...
in the same year under the now-familiar title ''The Devil's Workshop'' (''Des Teufels Werkstatt: Im Fälscherkommando des KZ Sachsenhausen''). The English language edition of the book was published by Frontline Books (London) in February 2009. Adolf Burger visited London to launch the book, with events at East Finchley's Phoenix Cinema and Jewish Book Week. He visited the Bank of England on Tuesday 24 February and met the Chief Cashier, Andrew Bailey. He was given a tour of the bank and the museum and presented with one of the notes which he had forged in the concentration camp more than sixty years earlier.
Screenwriter and director Stefan Ruzowitzky
Stefan Ruzowitzky (born 25 December 1961) is an Austrian film director and screenwriter.
Early life
Ruzowitzky was born in Vienna. He studied drama and history at the University of Vienna and started directing music videos, for example for 'N ...
adapted the book as the screenplay for his Austrian-German co-production ''The Counterfeiters'' that received a foreign-language Oscar in 2008. Burger checked every draft of the screenplay. Adolf Burger is played by the German actor August Diehl
August Diehl (; born 4 January 1976) is a German actor, primarily known to international audiences for playing Gestapo major Dieter Hellstrom in Quentin Tarantino's ''Inglourious Basterds'' and Michael "Mike" Krause, Evelyn Salt's husband, in the ...
. He is one of only two prisoner characters in the film that has an authentic historical name and is not synthesized from several real-life prisoners involved in Operation Bernhard[Stefan Ruzowitzky in an interview wit]
Michael Guillén, "Stefan Ruzowitzky: 'Sometimes Right, Sometimes Wrong.'" ''GreenCine.com'', 22 Feb. 2008.
(the other is the opera singer, Isaak Plappler who also was still living when the film was made).
Bibliography
* In Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
*Czech, ...
:
** 1945, written by Sylva and Oskar Krejčí, ''Číslo 64401 mluví.'' Prague.
** 1983, ''Komando padělatelů.'' Prague. (translated into English as ''The Devil's Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation''. London: Frontline Books, 2009)
** 1991, ''Ďáblova dílna: V padělatelském komandu koncentračního tábora Sachsenhausen.'' Prague.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Burger, Adolf
1917 births
2016 deaths
People from Kežmarok District
Slovak Jews
Jewish Czech writers
People condemned by Nazi courts
Sachsenhausen concentration camp survivors
Auschwitz concentration camp survivors
Czechoslovak communists
Czechoslovak journalists
Czechoslovak writers
Czechoslovak Jews
Czech people of Slovak descent
Mauthausen concentration camp survivors