KEY POINTS:
As we have seen - too much for my liking in the last few years - when politicians decide it's time for us to go to war with some other country, they do so proclaiming love for that country's citizens and hatred for its leaders.
The people
of the country in question, they tell us, are good honest folk deserving a better shake in life and their leaders are corrupt, self-serving dictators whose removal is an urgent necessity. That wasn't always the case.
Previously wars were conducted in a "gentlemanly" fashion, meaning that rulers were courteous towards one another and mutually contemptuous of their foot soldiers. That changed in World War I, and by World War II almost nothing was off the table.
Counterfeiting the enemy's currency in an effort to bring them to their knees was a widespread idea but only Germany seems to have pursued it enthusiastically. Malkin's book is a story of the German programme to counterfeit the British pound. It's an interesting story and provides an insight into the famously chaotic Nazi state.
Malkin doesn't seem to be quite sure whether he wants to write a timeline of events or a personal story, and ends up doing a bit of both. The real potential for this story, only sporadically addressed, is the way various factions and cliques within the Nazi state used the forgery operation as a tool in their constant fighting with one another.
By 1942 it became clear that no amount of fake currency was going to bring down the British state, and the bills produced were more valuable in paying for guns and spies. And that's to say nothing of the workers, most of them concentration camp inmates, who had furious arguments about how much to sabotage the project - too much and it would be abandoned, but too little and it might be too successful, meaning they would return to the camps.
Unfortunately stories of bureaucratic shuffling, even against a backdrop of genocide and global war, can be faceless and boring. I can't blame Malkin for wanting to tell more of a boy's own adventure story.
I have a fairly high level of fatigue for World War II histories, and this kept my attention, so I guess I shouldn't criticise.
* Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington historian and writer.
Krueger'S Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19
By Lawrence Malkin (Hachette Livre $30)
