 | This is a story often told. However, based on excerpts from the author's website, I judge this to be a conceptual -- and conceptually moral -- retelling, more than just an adventure or a documentary. In these outtakes, the bold face type is my own highlighting of the clues that led me to judge this as much a work of morality as a mere war-story.
Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19 by Lawrence Malkin
http://www.lawrencemalkin.com/
http://www.lawrencemalkin.com/kruegers-men-excerpts.html
The Second World War was barely two weeks old when leaders of Nazi espionage and finance gathered in a paneled conference room in Germany 's Finanzministerium, at Wilhelmstrasse 61 . Like the other overbearing buildings lodged behind pseudo-classical fronts, its architecture was proud and brooding. Most windows gracing this official avenue were topped by a heavy triangular tympanum. But the Finance Ministry was erected in the 1870s without this classical adornment, adopting instead the Italianate style of a Medici palace. Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin 's Pennsylvania Avenue, its Whitehall, gloried in the name of the kaisers of imperial Germany . The Finance Ministry stood toward its southern end. Farther down, the street was traversed by Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where stood a huge, pillared palace, the L-shaped headquarters of the Gestapo.
Details were put forward by Arthur Nebe, chief of the SS criminal police, a schoolteacher's son and an ambitious, opportunistic senior civil servant who habitually injected himself into the many conspiracies that lay at the heart of the Nazi movement. ... He was the German representative on the International Criminal Police Commission, formed after World War I principally to track counterfeiters and drug smugglers across Europe 's borders and later known as Interpol from its cable address. After the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938, they moved the commission's headquarters from Vienna to Berlin, gaining access to fifteen years of case files and suborning its original purpose of tracking counterfeiters and drug smugglers.. Heydrich also hoped to extend his reach as far as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in order to obtain U.S. passport forms for possible forgery. (The FBI remained hesitantly in touch with the International Criminal Police Commission, breaking all contact only three days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.)
If viewed merely as an espionage caper, the plot is one of the more benign of the Nazis' many nefarious projects endemic to such a gangster regime. But the story touches a deeper nerve and still prompts inquiries almost every month to the Bank of England, a perverse tribute to the continuing fascination with Nazi totalitarianism, which even today stimulates the darkest infantile fantasies of absolute power and stolen wealth. ... [The Nazi's] best spy ended up in the movies even though Berlin ignored his information. Their most daring commando won a place in history books where he hardly deserved a mention. ... it demonstrated how easily the chaotic nature of totalitarian finance can degenerate into venal self-destruction. The British were embarrassed for half a century, but they won the war. The fundamental lesson is as applicable today as in 1939, or indeed whenever new kinds of warfare appear. In a war of choice, even the most imaginative plans for its conduct and financing can spin out of control if untested by the critical questioning essential to democracy.
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Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19 by Lawrence Malkin
