Counterfeit British £5 notes during WW2

My father worked in the bank during the war and I remember him saying that a 5 pound note was a rare sighting. As for Wikipedia, I have on a number of occasions, had to correct inaccuracies in my area of expertise. Wikipedia does not guarantee accuracy - it invariably needs references to do this!

 

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Those Jewish guys were clever. The Germans on the other hand were complete imbeciles - so much so that they didn't even drop the notes over England as planned instead they foisted them off on their "intelligence gathering" nitwits who used them to pay for prostitutes, villas in the Italian alps and automobiles.

 

@davedempsey - your dad is a hero, you are blessed to have him and we are blessed that he is around to remind us of the Greatest Generation - for me thinking about all we are going through with this Covid debacle - I think about what people in your dad's generation had to endure during the Great Depression then WWII.

 

Who in the world traipses into Taco Bell with a $100 bill and actually expects them to accept it? For crike's sake they won't even accept a $2 bill.

 

Thankyou for that.
He lives alone but has lots of help.

He might forget what he's had for dinner, but history is not a problem.

On Sunday he went through a list in his head of every car he has ever owned and he still remebered the registration numbers of each one.

 

This site is more accurate and shows why some counterfeited notes did turn up in Britain.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/operation-bernhard

 

Who cares what they had for dinner earlier, I don't. But I sure would like to hear the car stories!

 

This subject has a little more interest to me as it was the theme of the 1952 Motion Picture "Five Fingers" starring James Mason. And music by Bernard Herrrman as well as a popular song by Edith Piaf, whom I just recently fell head over heals with, due to the still current Allstate Insurance Commercial. In any case this appears to have been the brainstorm of Dr. Schact, economics minister. And the subject of a book which I read "I Was Cicero". Probably out of print now, but Google seems to think the author was actually a "double-agent". Who knows?

 

If I recall correctly I remember reading something about how the counterfeit notes weren’t the correct shade of white to the real ones and it turns out it was because the minerals in the water in Britain were not the same as the minerals in the water in Germany.

Eventually though they figured that out and were able to match it.

I also read that they were working on counterfeiting US Dollars and by the time the war ended they had managed to accomplish it but were still stuck trying to figure out how the serial numbers worked.

 

Five pound notes were VERY rare indeed. My father occasionally had some, and on one never-to-forgotten day, he actualy gave me one - this would have been round about the coronation years, 1953.

The back of the note was blank, which was just as well, because many people would not accept the note unless the back was signed, just in case it was a forgery. It was quite common to see a note with 7 or 8 signatures on it