THE COUNTERFEITERS: Making money in Nazi concentration camps

Writer and director Stefan Ruzowitzky gives us a different view of Nazi prison camps with THE COUNTERFEITERS, based on Adolf Burger's recollections of The Devil's Workshop. Ruzowitzky takes the audience into an underground operation in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where prisoners made counterfeit British Pounds and American Dollars.

Ruzowitzky sets the story's sights on the men of "the golden cage" - where those prisoners were forced to make the counterfeit money - who are well fed and sleep on upgraded mattresses and linens. Conflicts arise when our hero Salomon Sorowitsch does nothing to hinder the acts of the Nazis, while a fellow inmate does everything in his power to sabotage the project. Ruzowitzky questions poetically, "Is it possible to enjoy our rich, sheltered lives in the face of all the suffering in the world?"

Born in Vienna in 1961, Stefan Ruzowitzky studied film, theater and history. He made his feature directorial debut with Tempo, winning The Max Ophuels Award in 1997. Two separate production companies approached Ruzowitzky with the idea for the film. He exerts, "It was clearly a sign of fate." His grandparents were "some more some less- attached to the Nazi-party."

"Living in a country that still has big problems dealing with its Nazi past, I always felt that I have to comment on this issue as a filmmaker," he says. "We have to talk about the Holocaust and have a moral obligation to do so in a way that reaches as many viewers as possible."

The story has an adventurous nature to it.

"A film about the Holocaust should be exciting and entertaining, in the best sense of the word. But I would also like to say that I would never have dared to depict the everyday horror of a 'normal' concentration camp."