Chat Ed : Welcome to this evening's 'Great Nazi Cash Swindle' chat with Director/Producer John Christie!
digitalskittles : Hi John welcome to C4
Katie : Hi John, thanks for coming to speak to us :)
John Christie : Hello everyone I was the Producer/Director of this programme - I also photographed it.
Danny : Really amazing story, I have never heard of it before, where did you find the story?
John Christie : I first found the story in 2000. I found it in an antiquarian book catalogue and it was called “Operation Bernard” and it was advertised as the “greatest forgery ever”. So I bought the book and read it and thought what a fantastic story. I began to research it...there wasn't that much in English about it. Then I started to try and track down some of the forgers and gradually I started to find them through searching through a centre in Washington where you send your request in and they forward it on to any of the people that are still alive and they leave it up to them to get in contact with you if they want to. I also found another book that was written by one of the survivors and I found out that he lived in Brooklyn I looked him up in the Brooklyn phonebook. I think he was the second person with that name that I called. This was well before the programme was ever commissioned. It was turned down by Channel 4 the first time round, and Channel Five and the Discovery Channel. Then eventually Channel 4 picked it up. The sad thing was that when we went back to see the man in Brooklyn once we were commissioned 18 months later he had lost lots of his memory, so he wasn't in it as much as we had liked. He was still in it but he was just getting too old. Eventually we found six people who were still alive: two in America, one in Canada, one in Amsterdam, one in Prague and one in Berlin. From those we picked four to go and see. I think the main two people that you see in the programme - Jack from Berlin and Paul from Montreal - both had very vivid memories of this experience. One of the things that I discovered - although it sounds obvious – was that one of the reasons that they chose to speak to me was that I promised to try and tell the truth as much as I could about the episode. What I found after I'd interviewed them was that they remembered things differently. So they often contradicted each other, so I had to steer a careful path through what they were saying...
Travis : It must have been very emotional for the Jewish exprisoners remembering their times did you have to be very patient asking them about their time or where they keen to remember?
John Christie : They were keen to remember but, as Paul says in the programme, 'If you want me to talk about this I have to visualise it and when I visualise it I'm there so you'll have to forgive me if I am emotional about it'. He was quite emotional and at first that was quite difficult. I didn't want to upset him or anything. He wasn't bothered about getting emotional about it though. So if he cracked up slightly we would pause, he would compose himself and we would carry on. He just wanted to tell the story. In fact when the film was finished I was told it was going to be on C4 this summer so I thought we'd send them a copy and I got very nice replies from them. I was very apprehensive about what Paul would say as he was in it so much and was incredibly relieved when he said he liked it. There was a huge amount of information that we couldn't put in the programme because of time restraints. When the SS marched them down to the camp in Ebensee there were two thirds of the men there and Paul was near the front of the queue and he heard the SS guard say 'We've got orders for these men to be killed'. He said the orders were with the last group that were walking over the mountains so it was a miracle that they survived in that way.
Courtney : Hi, what would have happened if the money had swamped Britain, could it have extended the war, or just caused a little more chaos?
John Christie : The idea would have been to swamp Britain which would have caused some people to hand it in and some people would have kept it - this would have ruined people's confidence in the currency which I suppose would have led to chaos. They didn't do it in the end because it became too useful not to.
alex : why do you think the Nazis decided against saturating England with the forged notes
John Christie : Within the Nazi hierarchy you had a real divergence of opinions and so for instance the head of the Gestapo wrote a memo to the head of the SS in which he said 'Forging money, this kind of behaviour, is the sort of thing that will bring the Third Reich into disrepute' … so all the other things they were doing didn't compare to tampering with money!? The SS used the money to fund their spying, they bought gold with it and jewels and dollars. They basically bought real money and things with it and paid off their spies. John Keyworth at the Bank of England said when we interviewed him that the forger had two problems. One was to make the forgery in the first place and the second one was to get rid of it, but the forger only has to get rid of the money once and then it's over for him as it's then in circulation. It then takes quite a long time to stop it. So yes in the programme John Keyworth asked why they didn’t do it because it could have created chaos.
Lamb : Just how much money was made, and how does that compare with how much the Bank of England would have produced in that time?
John Christie : The official figure for how much money was actually printed is something around £134 million. Now that is the equivalent, in today's terms, of almost £3 billion. So it's an awful lot. One thing that was pointed out to us was that in fact the Bank of England were printing money beyond their own gold reserves. So they were almost doing the same thing, except to themselves. There are lots of different opinions as to whether it would have made a difference or not but it certainly would have caused chaos when people lost faith in the money in their pockets - that is why the Bank of England kept it quiet.
Carey : Some of the comments seemed to suggest that Kruger was responsible for the prisoners surviving their times in the camps, but they were keen not to dismiss the possibility that he may have been responsible for a lot of deaths, did you find out any of the truth of this in your research?
John Christie : I think in the end Kruger got off quite lightly. He seems to have been a likeable person, a fair person to them, but of course he wanted something from them. If they didn't produce that money he would have been in trouble so they were treated better than the people actually in the prison camp. In the end he was an SS man, in the SS from 1932 so it was his career. He was a thorough SS guy and took advantage of that. He did save them up to the extent that he picked them - he picked the people that were useful to him, but in the end they were left to the loyal SS guys who carried on trying to carry out their orders right to the very end. I tracked down his grand daughter to try and get some more pictures of him. I explained to her what we were doing and she said “Well how are you going to treat my grandfather?”. I told her we wouldn't say anything personally about him because we didn't know him but that I was going to let the prisoners who did know him and were captured by him say what they want. That was our agreement. I told her I didn't myself understand him. He seemed a cultured character and yet he was in the SS. I asked her how she felt about it and she said she didn't understand him either. Then she sent me the photographs of him. After the war he was put before a tribunal and several of the prisoners came forward and spoke up for him and he got off. I think it was self-motivated, he was no Oscar Schindler. They were basically providing him the means of having a fairly cushy life.
Katie : John, you obviously are very excited by this subject ... it must have been fabulous working on something that you are so interested in ... what other subjects would you like to cover?
John Christie grins
John Christie : Well there are two problems here. One is that to cover things that you are very interested in it's not like writing a book - you have got to get a broadcaster to become interested as well so it becomes more difficult. You have to get them to the point where you can present them to a Commissioning Editor and they have to get as excited as you about it and see that there is a place in their schedules for you. One of the things about Operation Bernard was that they said they had too many programmes about the war so it was dismissed out of hand.
Chat Ed : That's it! Thanks for coming and talking to us John!
Katie : Thank John
alex : great programme and chat
Tinker Mel : Ta ra, God bless John
John Christie : I'm really pleased that everyone enjoyed the programme - that is the main thing. Thank you everyone. Goodbye!
Travis : Thank you for coming on
John Christie leaves the room
