The experience, Adolf Burger would later recall, was like being “corpses on holiday.” Imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, he was detailed to Operation Bernhard, a massive Nazi plot that relied on concentration camp inmates to forge British currency.

The fake bank notes – a total of more than 130 million pounds – were to be dropped by Luftwaffe airplanes over England in an attempt to upset the British economy. Although ultimately aborted, the top-secret plan, unknown at the time even to the camp commandant, is believed to have been one of the largest attempts ever at financial sabotage.

“It was a forgery factory,” said Margaret Shannon, a Washington-based research historian who collaborated on a book about the episode.

Because the scheme depended on the labor and skill of inmates – craftsmen, bankers, at least one professional counterfeiter and book printers such as Burger – the prisoners received some special privileges, such as the provision of blankets, civilian clothing, cigarettes and extra food. But they knew that at any time they might be killed, and it was only amid the chaos as the Allies advanced in 1945 that they escaped execution.

‘WORSE THAN AUSCHWITZ’

“In a way, it was worse than Auschwitz because we knew for certain they were going to kill us because of what we had done,” Burger later told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Burger, whose account of Operation Bernhard was later dramatized in the Oscar-winning Austrian film “The Counterfeiters,” died Dec. 6 in Prague. He was 99. The Associated Press reported his death, citing an announcement on the public broadcaster Czech Radio. The cause was not immediately available.

Burger was born on Aug. 12, 1917, to a Jewish family in Velka Lomnica, a village in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now northern Slovakia. Trained as a typographer, he did his earliest counterfeiting as a member of the Communist underground, producing false baptism papers in an effort to help Jews survive persecution.

Slovakia, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, was the first Axis partner to permit the deportation of its Jews for the Final Solution. Burger was arrested in 1942, the day before his 25th birthday, and deported with his wife, Gisela, to Auschwitz, where she perished.

‘I CHOSE LIFE’

“I had two choices: either to go and touch the barbed wire with 1,000 voltage in it and be dead in a second, or stay alive,” Burger later said in a radio interview cited by the AP. “I chose life, so I can tell everyone what they have done here.”

He withered to 80 pounds and was infected with typhus in a Nazi medical experiment, the Wall Street Journal reported in a 2007 profile. He said that a guard took a rifle to his face and knocked out his teeth simply because his given name was, like Hitler’s, Adolf.

But in 1944, Burger was informed that he had been chosen for a special assignment. Ordered by SS chief Heinrich Himmler and named for its SS overseer, Bernhard Krueger, the project involved roughly 140 inmates selected mainly from Auschwitz on the basis of their prewar professional expertise.

They were gathered at Sachsenhausen and housed in two barracks with windows painted over so that their activities could not be observed. Inside, the men churned out millions of bank notes, adhering to the highest standards of quality, as required by the Nazis, but sometimes engaging in delaying tactics to sabotage the effort.

“Britannia was hard” to capture, Burger told the Journal, referring to the depiction in the top-left corner of the bank note of the toga-clad, spear-wielding symbol of Great Britain.

The inmates also forged stamps, passports and U.S. dollars, but the British bank notes accounted for the bulk of their work.Germany never managed to deliver the counterfeit money to England, Shannon said.Burger wrote several memoirs, including one translated in English as “The Devil’s Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation.”

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