The Counterfeiters won the foreign-language Oscar on February 24, creating buzz for the Austrian film that had opened in this country in limited release just two days earlier.

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, the movie is about a wartime Nazi plot to destroy the economies of Great Britain and the United States by using concentration-camp prisoners to print massive amounts of counterfeit currencies that would then be interjected into the target economies. The movie is based on the memoir The Devil’s Workshop by concentration-camp survivor/counterfeiter Adolph Burger, though in the movie the name of the real-life Burger is changed to Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch.

Notwithstanding the evil nature of the Nazi regime, the plot brought to the silver screen by The Counterfeiters does illustrate the fact that the Nazis fully understood that inflation (increasing the money supply) can be used to destroy a currency. The Nazi regime fell before this plot got very far, but without the help of the Nazis or any other hostile foreign regime, our own Federal Reserve System has for many years been inflating our currency, effectively accomplishing what the Nazis had hoped to accomplish, albeit more gradually. Thanks to the Fed, almost $12 would be needed today to equal the purchasing power of $1 in 1945.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | newsvine | technorati