Operation Bernhard

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.