As a Holocaust story, the Oscar-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters is a little too entertaining. It even has, unlike most movies of its kind, a happy ending. But it is based on a true story: how the Nazis ran the largest counterfeiting operation in history from inside a concentration camp. The master counterfeiters were imprisoned Jews, and if they were successful, the money would be used by the Nazis to flood the economies of England and America and win the war. It’s a fascinating and little-known episode.

Into this scenario, director and writer Stefan Ruzowitzky (adapting the book The Devil’s Workshop by Adolf Burger) inserts certain fancies, including a prior relationship between the Nazi officer and the master counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch (played perfectly by Karl Markovics).

But the greater tension is between inmates, who disagree about what they’re willing to do, even though death is the punishment for defying orders. One, the eventual author of the real-life book, Burger (played by August Diehl), is a principled fighter—and a potential martyr. He has the skill that will complete the last piece of the puzzle of counterfeiting the English pound, but he refuses to deploy it in an attempt to sabotage the Nazis. Sorowitsch is furious, both as a pragmatic survivor and as a storied counterfeiter.

Just as there are characters of varying virtue on the Jewish side of the camp, so there are Nazis of varying monstrosity. The real subject of this film is extremism: When is it not only justified but also productive? The delay caused by Burger did keep the Nazis from flooding the economies of England and America long enough for the Allies to win the war, but Burger’s own survival had less to do with his politics than with the protection of Sorowitsch, who in some ways cozied up to the Nazi project. Without both men—which is to say, without the relative moderation produced by the interaction of both tendencies—history might be different. The expediency of political moderation is a strange virtue to emerge from a Holocaust film, but here it is, a moral uncomfortable enough to distract from the entertainment.

THE COUNTERFEITERS DIR. STEFAN RUZOWITZKY | RATED R | AT SELECT THEATERS

Tags: Film, holocaust, Nazis, Reviews, the counterfeiters