Adolf Burger, the last of the concentration camp inmates forced by Nazi Germany to churn out phoney British money, has died at the age of 99, media reports said Thursday.
Burger wrote a book about his astounding experience, which was turned into the film "The Counterfeiters" that went on to win the Oscar for best foreign film in 2008. Czech public radio reported that he died on Tuesday, citing information from his daughter. Burger had lived in Prague since the end of World War II.
He was a Jewish activist from Slovakia who spent two years working in the ultra secret counterfeiting operation, one of the largest in history, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. The 139 printers and forgers would succeed in replicating the pound and the dollar before the end of the war, and would produce 131 million pounds in false notes as part of a scheme by the bankrupt German state to flood the British economy with fake cash.