Money from the Holocaust draws collector interest

By Randall Mikkelsen

PHILADELPHIA (Reuter): The currency of the Holocaust comes in many shapes and colors, and bears witness to economies based on deception, oppression and horror.

"Money is a story," said Wilbur Pierce, a Philadelphia businessman who is a leading collector and dealer of money connected to the World War Two slaughter of Jews.

"In each of these stories there is both humanity and inhumanity," he said.

Pierce, 52, and other collectors say interest in the currency has mushroomed since the opening of the Holocaust museum in Washington and the success of the Oscar-winning Holocaust movie Schindler's List.

Individual notes, such as rare bills from the Auschwitz death camp, can sell for thousands of dollars. Buyers include synagogues, Holocaust survivors or relatives of victims.

"It's really been percolating now," said Alan York, of East Hampton, New York, an early scholar of the currency.

Holocaust currency includes money from concentration camps and closed ghettos, forgeries made by Jewish prisoners of the Nazi regime, and bills with anti-Semitic propaganda that circulated in Germany and Austria before and during the war.

Pierce said the money offers a concrete medium for remembering and learning about the Holocaust.

"The story needs to be told so it doesn't happen again," Pierce said. However, he added, "You can't live your life looking at piles of gold teeth, pillows made with hair, and lamps made of skin."

The money reflects in its variety grim resolve, despair, artistry, subterfuge or hate. And it reveals chapters of the Holocaust saga that may have otherwise escaped notice.

'We are here'

For example, one series of notes prized by collectors was used in an Australian camp for Jews and other refugees who had fled Europe to Britain and then been shipped on.

Within a printed border of razor wire, a message of mystified exasperation was interwoven on the notes: "We are here because we are here because we are here".

Similarly, a captive artist at the Oranienburg "model" camp for political prisoners near Berlin scratched away a piece of lettering on a plate used to engrave the camp's distinctive Third-Reich style bills.

The act, later acknowledged as deliberate by the artist, changed lettering on the bill from des konzentrationslagers -- German for "of the concentration camp" -- to konzentrationslayers, revealing in English the regime's brutality.

Camp money was given to inmates who had been stripped of real currency and other possessions, to workers in slave labor camps, or to collaborators with camp operators.

Prisoners could use the money for minor purchases or a visit to a camp brothel. "Each one of these camps was a home...the people needed money," Pierce said. "When you don't have an economic system, you have to create one."

At the Theresienstadt show ghetto in Bohemia, money was used to create a false picture of normality for international visitors to what was in reality a way station to Auschwitz.

Designers of that money were ordered to redraw Moses to make him fit Nazi stereotypes. On the bills, Moses holds tablets with the Ten Commandments, but "Thou shalt not kill" is obscured by his hands.

There is also currency from the Warsaw Ghetto, said to be issued to residents by the Jewish postal authority there. The designs are crude, block-printed in uneven blue ink.

Well before Adolf Hitler came to power and launched the Holocaust, the ground was being paved by anti-Semitic messages printed on a variety of currency, some issued by inflation- ravaged local communities as "emergency money".

Counterfeit notes

On an Austrian bill from 1922, a message printed over the engraving reads, "Jews have the gold in their banks, but shit remains in your hands". There is also state-issued currency with blatant anti-Semitic slogans and images.

During the war, several Jewish prisoners were forced to participate in an elaborate scheme to undermine Britain's economy by printing and circulating counterfeit notes in British pounds, Pierce said.

The counterfeits were regarded as masterful, but the Nazis were unable to get them over to England in any quantity.

Pierce, an American of Russian-Jewish descent, said his main goal in collecting and re-selling Holocaust currency is to both teach and learn about the Holocaust.

"I want it out there. I think it belongs in every synagogue, all over the world. I think it belongs in every school," he said.

And he said he hopes it brings out more stories of the trauma. "I'd love to have somebody call me who says 'hey, I used this money'. There may not be anybody left who saw money in Auschwitz."