Operation Bernhard was a vast Nazi plan during the Second World War to destabilise Britain by flooding its economy with forged banknotes. More than 140 Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp were forced to produce highly convincing copies of £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes after studying thousands of genuine bills and replicating around 150 security features. An estimated nine million counterfeit notes were created, with a face value equivalent to billions of pounds today.

The original scheme to drop the notes over Britain was abandoned, and the forged money was instead used to fund espionage and buy supplies in neutral countries. The operation was eventually exposed because the counterfeiters could not accurately reproduce the complex serial number system, leading to duplicated numbers being detected by the Bank of England in 1943. In response, higher denomination notes were withdrawn from circulation, and new, more secure designs were introduced in the years after the war.

Many of the forged notes were destroyed or dumped in an Austrian lake as the war ended, while the prisoners were moved and later freed by Allied forces. Some surviving examples are now on display at Holocaust Centre North after being donated by collector Andy Taylor, with the exhibition aiming to educate the public about the human cost behind one of history’s largest counterfeiting operations and its renewed attention through the television drama Peaky Blinders.