Operation Bernhard

Overview

Operation Bernhard was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy during the Second World War. The first phase was run from early 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under the title Unternehmen Andreas. The unit successfully duplicated the rag paper used by the British, produced near-identical engraving blocks and deduced the algorithm used to create the alpha-numeric serial code on each note. The unit closed in early 1942 after its head, Alfred Naujocks, fell out of favour with his superior officer, Reinhard Heydrich.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

Operation Bernhard was a Nazi German program to undermine the British economy through large-scale counterfeiting of British banknotes. The initial scheme, run under the title Unternehmen Andreas from early 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst, aimed to flood Britain with forged currency and trigger an economic collapse. Before the operation could reach that stage, the unit achieved significant technical milestones: successfully duplicating the rag paper used in genuine British notes, producing near-identical engraving blocks, and reverse-engineering the algorithm behind the alphanumeric serial codes. The first phase closed in early 1942 when its head, Alfred Naujocks, fell out of favour with his superior Reinhard Heydrich, ending that iteration of the program before the forged notes could be deployed at scale.