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Fight for what you believe in and face certain death - or co-operate with the enemy to save your own skin? Such is the dilemma at the heart of Stefan Ruzowitzky's compelling WWII drama about concentration camp Jews who are spared the gas chamber - in exchange for printing fake money for the Nazis. Known as Operation Bernhard, the Nazi scam, which set out to crush the British and US economies with counterfeit cash, succeeded in forging over £130 million before the end of the war.

Professional forger Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is arrested in Berlin and, with the onset of war, taken to Sachsenhausen to produce counterfeit dollars. His decision to willingly collude with the Nazis is not shared by fellow conspirator Adolf Burger (August Diehl), who would rather sabotage the operation than finance the Nazi war effort. Through its lead characters, The Counterfeiters raises questions about the rationality of moral courage in the face of adversity. Salomon appears on the surface to be a cold-hearted man, but his appearance betrays former cruelties which make it impossible not to empathise with him and the quandary in which he finds himself.

That Ruzowitzky's film is so gripping is partly due to his decision to create a tense thriller rather than get bogged down in grim drama. Yet the director highlights the horrors of war with remarkable subtlety; although the workers are sheltered from seeing the brutality and torture, the screams alone are terrifying. Challenging and thought-provoking, The Counterfeiters is Austria's nomination for the next Best Foreign Film Oscar - and on this evidence it deserves to win.

Money makes the war go on in Stefan Ruzowitzky's Berlinale Competition entry Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), which tells the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis -- using concentration camp labour -- to weaken the enemy's economy. Though not as emotionally resonant as other recent German-language films with similar settings, Die Fälscher does dig deeper into questions related to choice, survival and martyrdom -- and does so with greater clarity than any of its predecessors. Perhaps a tad too cerebral to be emotionally resonant, the film is nevertheless a very well-mounted and acted production that treats its themes with considerable depth.

The film opens with a prologue that combines two scenes. The first is set in immediate post-war Monte Carlo, where a rich man spends a fortune on gambling and expensive hotels. A girl he seduces is shocked to discover a number tattooed on his arm: the sign of an Auschwitz survivor. The second scene shows the same man, now identified as Salomin "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) in a nightclub in 1936 Berlin, where a woman walks away from him in disgust when she discovers he is a Jew. "She might come back to spew out the champagne," he says of the drink he just offered her. "It was Rothschild".

Sally was a gifted artist who turned to counterfeiting for the money: "Why make money with art when you can make money making money?" he says. But being a criminal and a Jew in the Nazi-era means Sally ends up in a concentration camp, though because of his exceptional skills he is soon transferred to another camp where beds are a bit softer, Sundays are off and food is more plentiful. He works on the Operation Bernhard, which is set up to flood the economies of the UK and the US with false money in order to fatally weaken their war economies and thus aid the German war effort.

Based on real events, the film opposes Sally, the charmer who believes Jews should adapt to survive (and who sees an opportunity to perfect his dollar and perhaps forget about war troubles by doing what he does best), and Adolf Burger (August Diehl), another Jewish concentration camp detainee who is a printing expert also working on Operation Bernhard and whose wife is still stuck in Auschwitz. Adolf refuses to use his skills for Nazi profit and would like to do something to stop Operation Bernhard's aid to the war effort, even something drastic, while Sally's view is that every day lived is another one gained, even if their work aids the Nazis.

In the film's screenplay, adapted by the director from the Adolf Burger memoirs Des Teufels Werkstatt ("The Devil's Workshop"), the direct question is not anymore one of survival of the body, but one of the soul: to which extent can a person be held responsible for actions committed under threat of severe sanctions or death? Can one allow oneself to live if it makes others, even unknowns, die? Would a sacrifice be worthwhile or would martyrdom be in vain?

Many would probably side with Adolf at first sight, but by presenting him as the antagonist to Sally's protagonist, Ruzowitzky makes a good case for both, blurring the line between good and evil and infinitely expanding the grey area between them. Die Fälscher explores its questions through its opposition of Adolf and Sally, their relationship with the other Jews working on the project and the Nazi officials in charge of them headed by Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow).

Though the emotional response to the film is not as direct as with other recent German-language films dealing with the Nazi-era, Ruzowitzky's cerebral film does explore its subject in more depth and with more scrutiny than many previous films on the era. In fact, though the film offers no real answers, its subject is presented in such an accessible manner that it rises above the Nazi-era setting completely, something which Der Untergang (Downfall) and Sophie Scholl - Die Letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl - The Final Days) did not.

With his elongated face and hollow eyes and cheeks, Markovics is the perfect choice for Sally, while Diehl (who earlier played an ambitious Nazi officer in Schlöndorff's Der Neunte Tag / The Ninth Day), again proves why he is considered one of the finest young actors in German-language cinema. Diehl has no rousing speeches but sells his character's sense of righteousness simply by underplaying it; only a very good actor can pull that off. Striesow and supporting cast are excellent, with young Sebastian Urzendowsky (Pingpong) especially noteworthy as a Russian Jew who befriends Sally. Technically, the film is on the same level as other recent Nazi-era films, though the tango-inspired score feels inappropriate.