Today’s note should prove to be very interesting! It is a FORGERY of a 1937 English 5 pound note. I stumbled across it on eBay of all places (from a dealer in the UK I have a good long standing relation with and trust); it is the ONLY one I have ever seen for sale anywhere and the only counterfeit that currency catalogs make any reference to. It has a book value of $65.00 ~ $90.00+ in XF condition. Obviously, there is no exchange rate on a counterfeit. It's pretty bland, but a note I am proud to have and will display. The history is what makes this note.... I have posted the history behind this note below the images if you are interested.

The back of the note is BLANK, so no scan.

Operation Bernhard: In 1942 in effort to destabilize the British economy during WWII the Germans used 142 Jewish printers and engravers imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp to work on a huge counterfeiting project headed by SS Major Bernhard Krüger.

The work of engraving the complex printing plates, developing the appropriate rag-based paper with the correct watermarks, and breaking the code to generate valid serial numbers was extremely difficult, but by the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press there had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being extremely difficult although not impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

Although the initial plan was to destabilise the British economy by dropping the notes from aircraft, on the assumption that while some honest people would hand them in most people would keep the notes, in practice this plan was not put into effect. Instead, from late 1943 approximately one million notes per month were transferred to a former hotel near Meran-Merano in Trentino-South Tyrol, northern Italy, from where it was laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and to pay German agents. It has been reported that counterfeit currency was used to finance the rescue of the arrested former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943.

The Bank of England detected the existence of the notes during the war, when a clerk recording a bundle of returned notes in the banks' ledgers noted that one of the notes had already been recorded as having been paid off.

Following the evacuation of Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiting team was transferred to Redl-Zipf in Austria, a sub-camp of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At the beginning of May 1945 the team was ordered to be transferred to the Ebensee sub-camp, where they were all to be killed together; however their SS guards had only one truck to convey their prisoners, so it was necessary for the truck to make three trips. On the third trip the truck broke down, and the last batch of prisoners had to be marched to Ebensee, where they arrived on 4 May. By this time, the guards of the first two batches of prisoners had fled because of the approach of the American army, and the prisoners had disappeared among the other sixteen thousand prisoners in the camp. Thus, because of the order that the prisoners all be killed together, none were actually killed. They were liberated from Ebensee by US forces on 5 May 1945. It is believed that most of the notes produced ended up at the bottom of Lake Toplitz, near Ebensee, from where they were recovered by divers in 1959, but examples continued to turn up in circulation in Britain for many years, which caused the Bank of England to withdraw all notes larger than £5 from circulation, and not reintroduce the denominations until the early 1960s (£10), 1970 (£20), or 1980 (£50).