Adolf Burger is a fighter. He spent his youth battling against the Nazis, and even now, at 90, he is still engaged in active struggle against the poisonous ideology that killed his wife, parents and millions of European Jews.

Burger has flown into Britain to promote The Counterfeiters, a gripping and moving Oscar contender by the Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky. The film is partly based on Burger’s wartime memoir The Devil’s Workshop, which details the biggest currency forgery scheme in history. It’s a story so incredible that it can only be true.

The Slovakian-born Burger was a communist and anti-Nazi activist, forging identity papers and baptism certificates to save the lives of fellow Jews. He and his 21-year-old wife Gisela were deported to Auschwitz in August 1942. She was murdered soon afterwards.

Burger was spared a similar fate only when Major Bernhard Krüger, a textile engineer, plucked him from Auschwitz to work on a top-secret Nazi project. He was moved to a specially isolated barracks in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin as part of Operation Bernhard, an audacious scheme to counterfeit millions of pounds to undermine the British economy. The 142 special inmates were isolated from regular prisoners in superior conditions, but death was ever present. They printed around £134 million, equivalent to over £3 billion today.

In The Counterfeiters Burger is played by August Diehl as a young communist fireband. Krüger has been thinly disguised as Friedrich Herzog (David Striesow), while the wily chief forger Salomon Smolianoff is renamed Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics).

Burger gave his approval only after three drafts of the script, but he accepts that drama requires a few tweaks to reality. “It is completely different from the book, but it’s not a documentary, it’s a cinema movie,” he says. “But the film is good because it tells people out there that the German state once tried to counterfeit. People will see that they were not just murderers but mean money-launderers.”

According to Lawrence Malkin, in his book Krüger’s Men, the counterfeiting operation was initially opposed by several high-ranking Nazis. Even Goebbels called it “grotesque”. But the scheme was eventually approved and, after a few false starts, began in earnest in 1942.

Germany’s initial intention was to flood the global money markets with fake pounds, then expose the forgery, thus devaluing sterling’s reputation and weakening an already strained British economy. Dumping millions of notes over Britain was also considered, on the basis that most Brits would put self-interest over economic patriotism. An overstretched Luftwaffe discounted this plan. Ultimately, the forgeries were used mostly to fund secret Nazi operations abroad.

In the film’s most significant departure from reality, the counterfeiters finally escape when Sachsenhausen is overrun by rioting prisoners and advancing Russian troops. In reality they were transferred to the Ebensee sub-camp in Austria for a planned mass execution which, thanks to a series of delays, never took place. Instead, they were liberated by American forces on May 5, 1945. At this point, Burger and Smolianoff went their separate ways.

“I told my friend Salomon: ‘Please promise me you will never counterfeit again’,” Burger recalls. “He promised me he wouldn’t do it any more. So we shook hands, and I have never seen him again.”

What happened after The Counterfeiters ends almost deserves a film of its own. Retreating German forces dumped most of the fake currency in Lake Toplitz in Austria. Several sodden, mouldering crates have since been recovered. Meanwhile, with so many forgeries already in circulation, the Bank of England was forced to withdraw all notes larger than £5 and redesign the banknotes.

Burger returned to Czechoslovakia, settled in Prague and worked as a printer. After experiencing so much tragedy so young, he appears to have lived a happy life. “When I was liberated by the Americans I went home very calmly, never had a bad dream,” he says. “For years I was silent, I didn’t want to speak about this any more. It was only when the neo-Nazis started with their lies about Auschwitz that I began to travel through Germany and give my speeches, to tell people what happened.”

He points to the rise of neo-fascists in Europe. “In the name of democracy they let them continue. But there mustn’t be democracy for murderers.”

The Counterfeiters is released on Oct 12, 2007

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