Shortly after World War II, Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Marcovics) arrives in Monte Carlo, carrying a briefcase packed with neat stacks of American dollars. After charming a young woman with his awkwardly good looks (and, presumably, his winning games), he goes with her back to his hotel room. As clothes begin to come off, the woman frantically grabs his arm, looking at a number tattooed by his wrist. Looking at him in disbelief, she speaks in heavily accented German.

“Aber du kommst doch nicht aus KZ?” But you don’t really come from a concentration camp?

And thus we switch from the tale of Salomon Sorowitsch, the winning gambler, to the tale of Salomon Sorowitsch, the “King of Counterfeiters.” It’s 1936 and Sorowitsch, a talented artist known to his friends as Sally, is making his living by counterfeiting passports and official documents for those who wish to leave the country as the Nazis strengthen their hold on Germany. Sally is well aware of the dangers he faces – not only by virtue of being a wanted criminal, but also by virtue of being a Russian Jew.

Misfortune befalls him police catch him in his workshop just after he’s finished counterfeiting an Argentinean passport for a woman wishing to escape. At the order of Inspector Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), Sally is labeled with a green triangle (indicating his arrest as a criminal) and a yellow triangle (forming a Star of David with the green one) and shipped to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

As soon as he arrives, Sally realizes he will have to be on his toes at all times in order to avoid death. He gets a break when an officer discovers his artistic talent and instructs him to paint portraits of officers and their families. In return for his artwork, Sally is kept well-fed – and alive.

A few years later, Sally is transported to Sachsenhausen, a camp north of Berlin. In his transport car, he meets Kolya Karloff (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a young Russian painter who is obviously starving and quite ill. Kolya is pleased to meet another Russian speaker, and even happier when he discovers Sally is an artist.

When they arrive at the camp, Sally once again comes face to face with Herzog, the man who captured him in 1936. Now Herzog is a Nazi commander in charge of supervising Sachsenhausen. Sally, Kolya, and a few other new arrivals are given cigarettes and new clothes – clothes which, they soon realize, belonged to prisoners who’d been gassed at other camps. The men are then filed into their barrack, which is full of beds with soft, individual mattresses. Kolya, accustomed to sleeping on a hard shelf in a tight mess of other prisoners, is in awe.

“But…nice beds. Why have they given us such nice beds?” he wonders.

The men in Sally and Kolya’s barrack at Sachsenhausen soon learn that this is no ordinary concentration camp. Their division is comprised of mostly of skilled tradesmen, mostly artists and printers. Sally is then given a tough assignment: he will lead the men in his barrack in Operation Bernhard, a massive scheme to counterfeit the British pound and the American dollar. Hitler is planning on flooding the British and American economies with counterfeit money, Herzog explains.

While the men live a fairly comfortable life in their barrack – they are given music, parties and even a ping-pong table to boost morale – they are indirectly exposed to the horrors of life outside their “Golden Cage.” They hear other men being punished, occasionally accompanied by screams and gunshots.

As the scheme moves forward, one printer named Adolf Burger (August Diehl) attempts to rally the men in an effort to hinder the operation. He is disgusted by the others’ willingness to help German fight the war, he says, and begins sabotaging the effort to print the dollar against the wills of the other prisoners. Sally tries to play both sides, easing Herzog’s concerns while trying to get Burger to capitulate in order to prevent Herzog from taking violent action against the other men. He also worries about Kolya, who has tuberculosis and will die if he’s not given the proper medication.

Sally’s breaking point comes as the Allied forces invade Berlin and the Nazis disappear from the camp. Though he’d acquired medicine for Kolya’s illness, the officers had noticed the boy’s constant coughing and shot him just before their mass departure. Kolya was like a son to him, and Sally is furious and riddled with guilt.

Loosely based on the story of Salomon Smolianoff, a notorious counterfeiter who was imprisoned in the concentration camps and enlisted to help Nazis produce fake British and American money, The Counterfeiters is a moving and emotionally trying film. It is particularly notable in that it focuses on Operation Bernhard, widely thought to be the biggest counterfeiting scheme of all time, and on the “survivor’s guilt” that many of the Sachsenhausen prisoners felt. While they were living in fairly good conditions, their friends and families were being murdered in other camps. Burger, who welcomes death as an alternative to helping his captors, is the voice of guilt for all the prisoners. But Sally and many of the other captives repress these feelings in hope of getting out.

“A day is a day,” Sally tells Burger at one point. Every day they live is one day closer to the war being over, and – possibly – to the prisoners’ survival, he says.

At the movie’s end, Sally sits next to the French woman on a beach in Monte Carlo. Having just lost thousands of his counterfeit dollars in another gambling match, he seems to be trying to reconcile his past with the survival he’d only managed to attain through questionable means.

“Du hast schlechtes Glueck gehabt.” the woman says. You had bad luck.