carelessly and bent out of alignment. Other devices contained only groups of numbers and letters. Krueger also found five copper plates for printing notes of £5, £10, £20, £50, and £100. They seemed to be in good condition, so he moved them to an upper shelf.
Then he extracted one of the counterfeit notes from its package. “‘Bank of England — the Sum of Ten Pounds,’ it read in a very pleasant, curvaceous, fine-lined, chiseled script,” Krueger recorded. “By the smoke of a cigarette, I examined the false note carefully, held it against the light to look at the watermark. Holding the paper with my fingertips, I tore it a bit. Since I had no way to compare it with an original note, I folded the Andreas note and shoved it back into the bundle, reconstituting the complete amount of notes.”
When he examined page after page of documents, he mainly found long lists of useless numbers on pages initialed by Albert Langer. What he most hoped to find were orders or records explaining why Andreas had been shut down; he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s mistakes. But he found no such papers. “I was convinced there had been none and could not have been… Everything emerged from oral orders, like those I had received a few days earlier.”
It was years before scholars discovered the only written evidence of any order from the Nazi leadership for Operation Bernhard, and even that was oblique. In Himmler’s personal daybook, his entry for July 16, 1942, reads:
“Pfundnoten zunächst Verwendung genehmigt”
— Pound notes authorized for use for the time being. The entry does not stipulate what use was to be made of the notes, where they came from, or even whether they were real. But it seems certain that the feared chief of all Nazi security services was referring not just to the production of counterfeit notes that he had again set in motion, but to a grander strategic plan to finance the secret schemes of the SS. The unique place of the SS in the Nazi system helps explain why the abortive plan to print counterfeit pounds was revived.
From the moment Heinrich Himmler took command of Hitler’s bodyguard of 280 men in 1929, this timorous, bespectacled, yet heartlessly cold individual began building it into a paramilitary police force. Its mission was the detection and ruthless repression of uprisings in the rear echelons, animated by the stab-in-the-back myth that Germany had lost World War I because domestic upheavals forced the frontline fighters to surrender when they were supposedly on the brink of victory. With Hitler in power, Himmler single-mindedly pursued his goal of building the SS into an
über
-state within the Nazi state. SS men were not just the Hollywood caricature of the sadistic brute — although they certainly were that — but something as unparalleled in history as Nazism itself: a political army. It was not to be like the Red Army, which was a military arm of the state with political commissars, but a disciplined party force pledged to defend Hitler’s blood-ideology and not just Germany’s territory.
Far from the propaganda picture that has passed into history of a flawlessly organized war machine that ran Panzer divisions and death camps with equal efficiency, we may take it from Hitler’s most exhaustive biographer, Ian Kershaw, that virtually all power centers in the regime were ceaselessly engaged in bureaucratic empire-building, Himmler’s no less than any of the others’. Hermann Goering’s four-year economic plan ran counter to Walther Funk’s financial ukases. The aristocratic military command was also at daggers drawn with the Nazi Party, whose members the Prussian generals rightly regarded as scum. So were their rival intelligence services. Working at cross-purposes was the norm.
Himmler’s security services were also chronically short of money. Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Himmler’s sworn enemy from the 1920s, kept him so strapped for cash that before the war, SS
Then he extracted one of the counterfeit notes from its package. “‘Bank of England — the Sum of Ten Pounds,’ it read in a very pleasant, curvaceous, fine-lined, chiseled script,” Krueger recorded. “By the smoke of a cigarette, I examined the false note carefully, held it against the light to look at the watermark. Holding the paper with my fingertips, I tore it a bit. Since I had no way to compare it with an original note, I folded the Andreas note and shoved it back into the bundle, reconstituting the complete amount of notes.”
When he examined page after page of documents, he mainly found long lists of useless numbers on pages initialed by Albert Langer. What he most hoped to find were orders or records explaining why Andreas had been shut down; he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s mistakes. But he found no such papers. “I was convinced there had been none and could not have been… Everything emerged from oral orders, like those I had received a few days earlier.”
It was years before scholars discovered the only written evidence of any order from the Nazi leadership for Operation Bernhard, and even that was oblique. In Himmler’s personal daybook, his entry for July 16, 1942, reads:
“Pfundnoten zunächst Verwendung genehmigt”
— Pound notes authorized for use for the time being. The entry does not stipulate what use was to be made of the notes, where they came from, or even whether they were real. But it seems certain that the feared chief of all Nazi security services was referring not just to the production of counterfeit notes that he had again set in motion, but to a grander strategic plan to finance the secret schemes of the SS. The unique place of the SS in the Nazi system helps explain why the abortive plan to print counterfeit pounds was revived.
From the moment Heinrich Himmler took command of Hitler’s bodyguard of 280 men in 1929, this timorous, bespectacled, yet heartlessly cold individual began building it into a paramilitary police force. Its mission was the detection and ruthless repression of uprisings in the rear echelons, animated by the stab-in-the-back myth that Germany had lost World War I because domestic upheavals forced the frontline fighters to surrender when they were supposedly on the brink of victory. With Hitler in power, Himmler single-mindedly pursued his goal of building the SS into an
über
-state within the Nazi state. SS men were not just the Hollywood caricature of the sadistic brute — although they certainly were that — but something as unparalleled in history as Nazism itself: a political army. It was not to be like the Red Army, which was a military arm of the state with political commissars, but a disciplined party force pledged to defend Hitler’s blood-ideology and not just Germany’s territory.
Far from the propaganda picture that has passed into history of a flawlessly organized war machine that ran Panzer divisions and death camps with equal efficiency, we may take it from Hitler’s most exhaustive biographer, Ian Kershaw, that virtually all power centers in the regime were ceaselessly engaged in bureaucratic empire-building, Himmler’s no less than any of the others’. Hermann Goering’s four-year economic plan ran counter to Walther Funk’s financial ukases. The aristocratic military command was also at daggers drawn with the Nazi Party, whose members the Prussian generals rightly regarded as scum. So were their rival intelligence services. Working at cross-purposes was the norm.
Himmler’s security services were also chronically short of money. Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Himmler’s sworn enemy from the 1920s, kept him so strapped for cash that before the war, SS
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