19 Facts About Adolf Burger

Adolf Burger was a Slovak Jewish typographer, memoir writer, and Holocaust survivor involved in Operation Bernhard.

Adolf Burger was born to a Jewish family in Gross Lomnitz, then a mostly ethnic German village in the High Tatras region, Spis County.

Adolf Burger entered apprenticeship with a local printer and typesetter at the age of fourteen.

Adolf Burger's mother remarried a Christian, which gave her the status of a non-Jew in Slovakia after the introduction of anti-Jewish laws by the beginning of World War II.

Adolf Burger did not join them and took up a job in a printing house in Bratislava in 1938.

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.

Adolf Burger was arrested on 11 August 1942, seven months after his marriage to his wife Gizela.

Adolf Burger was assigned to work at the new arrivals selection ramps.

Adolf Burger was selected for Operation Bernhard, transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in April 1944, and eventually to the Ebensee site of the Mauthausen camp network where he was liberated by the US Army on 6 May 1945.

Adolf Burger then settled in Prague 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.

Adolf Burger was harassed by the secret police during the Communist purges of the early 1950s.

Adolf Burger later worked in a shipyard, headed a department in Prague's municipal services, and became director of the city-sponsored taxicabs.

Adolf Burger died on 6 December 2016 at the age of 99.

Adolf Burger's manuscripts were written in a mixture of Czech and Slovak, and adjusted by editors for publication in standard Czech.

Adolf Burger began to rewrite his memoirs himself in the 1970s.

Adolf Burger's memoirs were published in 1983 as The Commando of Counterfeiters, which was translated and published in East Germany in the same year under the now-familiar title The Devil's Workshop.

Adolf Burger visited London to launch the book, with events at East Finchley's Phoenix Cinema and Jewish Book Week.

Adolf Burger 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.

Adolf Burger 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.