The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics, 2007, 98 minutes)
View the trailer here.
Academy Award nominee, 2008
In the course of human events, people sometimes did terrible things to dogs - and used dogs to do terrible things to other people. One example is the abuse of the German Shepherd dog in the Third Reich. Concentration camp guards used German Shepherds to intimidate and attack prisoners. As a result, many Holocaust survivors developed a lifelong fear of this breed and all big dogs.
Set in this terrible milieu, director Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters tells the true story of Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a convicted criminal sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There, he's put in charge of the workshop behind Operation Bernhard, the top-secret Nazi counterfeit operation - the biggest in history - organized to finance the German war effort with millions in fake pound and dollar notes. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, the film is based on the memoir of Adolf Burger, one of Sorowitsch's fellow detainees.
Although only glimpses of the dogs are seen, we hear them - loud, clear, and often - in the background. Every time a gun is fired out of sight, the terrifying, disorienting effect is amplified by the noise of barking. The dogs' audible terror heightens the tension we feel on the prisoners' behalf.
It's a tragic irony that Nazis, Hitler especially, have been regarded as dog lovers. In fact, part of SS officers' training was to rear a German Shepherd puppy - then strangle the grown dog after they'd become attached, to prove their willingness to follow orders. That's not dog love.
It's high time to understand that dogs, too, were victims of Nazi atrocities, forced to do things they didn't want to do.
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