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The true story that inspired the Oscar-winning movie The Counterfeiters


"An astonishing and exciting tale. The drama of how the Nazis mounted a complex counterfeiting operation inside a concentration camp is matched by the chilling life-or-death saga of the prisoners involved. It reads like a thriller, but it's all true." -Walter Isaacson, author of The Wise Men and Benjamin Franklin

Only a fortnight after the start of WWII, at a meeting that has remained a secret for more than half a century, Nazi leaders and officials of the German Reichsbank approved an audacious plot to counterfeit millions of British pounds.

Drawing upon top-secret bank records, German and British correspondence, and interrogation transcripts, Lawrence Malkin reveals how an unremarkable SS officer named Bernhard Krueger attempted to bring down the world financial system. But when Krueger discovered that forging pounds, and later dollars, was no easy task, he made a crucial decision: he would seek out the greatest counterfeiters of pre-war Europe and enlist them in the effort. He found them in an unexpected place: a Nazi concentration camp.

KRUEGER'S MEN is the remarkable story of how these Jews managed to save themselves. Part Schindler's List, part The Great Escape, this account of the Nazi plot is a fascinating portrait of deception, courage, and moral awakening.

"Few writers understand the mysterious intricacies of money better than Lawrence Malkin, and in KRUEGER'S MEN he has reconstructed one of the last great untold stories of World War II." -Robert Crowley, founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

"A hard gem of a book." -Tampa Tribune

"The compelling story of the Third Reich's attempt to wreck the British economy by flooding Europe with millions of counterfeit British pounds. . . . Thorough research and authoritative voice enable this fascinating chapter of history to hold interest. Gripping proof that indeed all is fair in love and war." -Kirkus Reviews

"An engrossing and often inspiring chronicle." -Booklist.
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At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs.

Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.
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In Colonial Conscripts, Myron Echenberg traces the social history of a large and diverse group of West Africans who served in Senegalese regiments of the French colonial army. Examining both how the soldiers and veterans lived out their lives in service and how the military institution functioned, Dr Echenberg also reviews the African military within a framework bounded by such issues as labor, migration, and demography. The main focus is on how rank-and-file African soldiers, officers, and veterans responded to their ambiguous and often contradictory position within the colonial social formation..
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"Do you know why I write so much? Because as long as you read, we are together "

-- Raizel Garncarz (Sala's sister),

April 24, 1941

Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. But then, few families have a mother and a daughter quite like Sala and Ann Kirschner. For nearly fifty years, Sala kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann and offer to answer any questions her daughter wished to ask. It was a life-changing moment for her scholar, writer, and entrepreneur daughter.

We know surprisingly little about the vast network of Nazi labor camps, where imprisoned Jews built railroads and highways, churned out munitions and materiel, and otherwise supported the limitless needs of the Nazi war machine. This book gives us an insider's account: Conditions were brutal. Death rates were high. As the war dragged on and the Nazis retreated, inmates were force-marched across hundreds of miles, or packed into cattle cars for grim journeys from one camp to another. When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Poland, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty. In the first years of the conflict, Sala was aided by her close friend Ala Gertner, who would later lead an uprising at Auschwitz and be executed just weeks before the liberation of that camp. Sala was also helped by other key friends. Yet above all, she survived thanks to the slender threads of support expressed in the letters of her friends and family. She kept them at great personal risk, and it is astonishing that she was able to receive as many as she did. With their heartwrenching expressions of longing, love, and hope, they offer a testament to the human spirit, an indomitable impulse even in the face of monstrosity.

Sala's Gift is a rare book, a gift from Ann to her mother, and a great gift from both women to the world..
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Late in 1940, the young men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment stepped off the trucks at Camp Bowie in Brownwood, Texas, ready to complete the training they would need for active duty in World War II. Many of them had grown up together in Jacksboro, Texas, and almost all of them were eager to face any challenge Just over a year later, these carefree young Texans would be confronted by horrors they could never have imagined.

The battalion was en route to bolster the Allied defense of the Philippines when they received news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Soon, they found themselves ashore on Java, with orders to assist the Dutch, British, and Australian defense of the island against imminent Japanese invasion. When war came to Java in March 1942, the Japanese forces overwhelmed the numerically inferior Allied defenders in little more than a week.

For more than three years, the Texans, along with the sailors and marines who survived the sinking of the USS Houston, were prisoners of the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning in late 1942, these prisoners-of-war were shipped to Burma to accelerate completion of the Burma-Thailand railway. These men labored alongside other Allied prisoners and Asian conscript laborers to build more than 260 miles of railroad for their Japanese taskmasters. They suffered abscessed wounds, near-starvation, daily beatings, and debilitating disease, and 89 of the original 534 Texans taken prisoner died in the infested, malarial jungles. The survivors received a hero's welcome from Gov. Coke Stevenson, who declared October 29, 1945, as "Lost Battalion Day" when they finally returned to Texas.

Kelly E. Crager consulted official documentary sources of the National Archives and the U.S. Army and mined the personal memoirs and oral history interviews of the "Lost Battalion" members. He focuses on the treatment the men received in their captivity and surmises that a main factor in the battalion's comparatively high survival rate (84 percent of the 2nd Battalion) was the comradery of the Texans and their commitment to care for each other.

This narrative is grueling, yet ultimately inspiring. Hell under the Rising Sun will be a valuable addition to the collections of World War II historians and interested general readers alike..
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In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.

Starved and brutalized, the GIs were denied their rights as prisoners of war, their ordeal culminating in a death march that was halted by liberation near the Czech border. Twenty percent of these soldiers–more than seventy of them–perished. After t_he war, Berga was virtually forgotten, partly because it fell under Soviet domination and partly because America’s Cold War priorities quickly changed, and the experiences of these Americans were buried.
Now, for the first time, their story is told in all its blistering detail. This is the story of hell in a small place over a period of nine weeks, at a time when Hitler’s Reich was crumbling but its killing machine still churned. It is a tale of madness and heroism, and of the failure to deliver justice for what the Nazis did to these Americans.

Among those involved: William Shapiro, a young medic from the Bronx, hardened in Normandy battles but, as a prisoner, unable to help the Nazis’ wasted slaves, whose bodies became as insubstantial as ghosts; Hans Kasten, a defiant German-American who enraged his Nazi captors by demanding, in vain, that his fellow U.S. prisoners be treated with humanity, thus committing the unpardonable sin of betraying his German roots; Morton Goldstein, a garrulous GI from New Jersey, shot dead by the Nazi in charge of the American prisoners in an incident that would spark intense debate at a postwar trial; and Mordecai Hauer, the orphaned Hungarian Jew who, after surviving Auschwitz, stumbled on the GIs in the midst of the Holocaust at Berga and despaired at the sight of liberators become slaves.

Roger Cohen uncovers exactly why the U.S. government did not aggressively prosecute the commandants of Berga, why there was no particular recognition for the POWs and their harsh treatment in the postwar years, and why it took decades for them to receive proper compensation.

Soldiers and Slaves is an intimate, intensely dramatic story of war and of a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust..
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Allen examines the SS executives and engineers who built up the vast slave-labor system in Nazi concentration camps. While the bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust operations are often portrayed as simply "cogs in the machinery," he reveals their ideological dedication to National Socialism..
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Working for the Enemy

General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, today the headquarters of European Ford.

In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today.

Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe.

After the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts production. Both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels.

During the first two years of the war, General Motors and Ford executives from the United States negotiated with the Nazi leadership the terms under which their German factories were converted to their wartime functions.

James Mooney, the leading GM executive in Europe, met with Hitler, Roosevelt and British diplomats in the months from October 1939 to March 1940 in the hope of mediating a peace that would have been favorable to Germany. Mooney was a recipient of the Order of the Golden Eagle, the highest Nazi honor for foreigners. Mooney shared that last distinction with Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, whose anti-Semitic writings in The International Jew (1921) were translated into many languages at his own expense and served as an inspiration to Hitler's Mein Kampf (1924).

German Ford Werke and Opel executives were integrated into the highest levels of the Third Reich's wartime production planning. As the war wore on and production became the highest homefront priority, they and their fellow corporate managers took an increasingly important role at the Reich Armaments Ministry. Contact between the German subsidiaries and the U.S. mother corporations continued up until the outbreak of war between the United States and Germany in December 1941, and there is ample evidence of subsequent communications.

During the war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German homefront economy. In the absence of millions of German men who had been sent to the front, forced labor became indispensible to German war production and agriculture.

As of August 1944, the high point of Nazi forced-labor programs, 8 million foreigners were being used as forced laborers within the borders of the Reich. The largest groups consisted of civilians rounded up from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union (mostly young women) and Poland as well as in the West, POWs from France, Poland, the Soviet Union and other countries, and Jewish and other laborers provided by the concentration camps in "work-to-death" programs.

Starting already in 1940, Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers. POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the companies.

In the longest section of the book, ten people who were forced to work at Ford Werke recall their wartime experiences in oral testimonies. Their story is vivid and moving.

For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor. The book briefly reviews that history.

In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The first lawsuit was filed against Ford Motor Company and Ford Werke AG, and General Motors was also sued in a wave of litigation that hit nearly every major German corporation, from Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz to Siemens and Bosch.

This was accompanied by a wave of German labor court cases demanding compensation for Nazi-era forced labor, and served to revive controversy over the still-unpaid compensations.

The book's concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known German corporations..
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