Best Kept Secret

possible for the Nazis to destabilize the British economy by flooding England with perfect copies of the five-pound
note, but only if he was allowed to select the finest printers, copper engravers and retouchers from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was the commandant. However, his biggest coup was to
recruit the master forger Salomon Smolianoff, whom he had arrested and sent to prison on no fewer than three occasions when he was with the Berlin police. Once Smolianoff was on board,
Krüger’s team were able to forge around twenty-seven million five-pound notes, with a face value of a hundred and thirty-five million pounds.’
    Harry had the grace to gasp.
    ‘Some time in 1945, when the Allies were advancing on Berlin, Hitler gave the order that the presses were to be destroyed, and we have every reason to believe they were. However, a few
weeks before Germany surrendered, Krüger was arrested trying to cross the German-Swiss border with a suitcase full of the forged notes. He spent two years in prison in the British sector of
Berlin.
    ‘We might have lost interest in him if the Bank of England hadn’t set alarm bells ringing by informing us that the notes found in Krüger’s possession were in fact genuine.
The governor of the bank at the time claimed that no one on earth was capable of counterfeiting a British five-pound note, and nothing could convince him otherwise. We questioned Krüger about
how many of these notes were in circulation, but before he would give us that information, he skilfully negotiated terms for his release, using Don Pedro Martinez as his bargaining chip.’
    Mr Spencer paused to take a sip of water, but no one interrupted him.
    ‘An agreement was struck to release Krüger after he’d served only three years of his seven-year sentence, but not until he’d informed us that, towards the end of the war,
Martinez had made a deal with Himmler to smuggle twenty million pounds’ worth of forged five-pound notes out of Germany and somehow get them to Argentina, where he was to await further
orders. That wouldn’t have proved difficult for a man who’d smuggled everything from a Sherman tank to a Russian submarine into Germany.
    ‘In return for another year off his sentence, Krüger informed us that Himmler, along with a handful of carefully selected members of the top Nazi leadership, including possibly even
Hitler himself, were hoping to escape their fate by somehow getting to Buenos Aires, where they would then live out their days at the Bank of England’s expense.
    ‘However, when it became clear that Himmler and his cronies would not be showing up in Argentina,’ continued Spencer, ‘Martinez found himself in possession of twenty million
pounds in forged notes that he needed to dispose of. Not an easy task. To begin with, I dismissed Krüger’s story as pure fantasy, invented to save his own skin, but then, as the years
passed, and more and more bogus five-pound notes appeared on the market whenever Martinez was in London or his son Luis was working the tables in Monte Carlo, I realized we had a real problem. This
was proved yet again when Sebastian spent one of his two five-pound notes on a Savile Row suit and the assistant didn’t suggest that they were not genuine.’
    ‘As recently as two years ago,’ chipped in Sir Alan, ‘I expressed my frustration with the Bank of England’s stance to Mr Churchill. With the simplicity of genius, he gave
orders that a new five-pound note should be put into circulation as quickly as possible. Of course, bringing such a note into circulation could not be done overnight, and when the Bank of England
finally announced its plans to issue a new five-pound note, they gave Martinez notice that he was running out of time in which to dispose of his vast fake fortune.’
    ‘And then those mountebanks at the Bank of England,’ came back Mr Spencer with some feeling, ‘announced that any old five-pound notes presented to the Bank before December
thirty-first, 1957, would be exchanged for new ones. So all Martinez had to do was smuggle his forged notes into Britain, when the Bank of England would happily convert them into legal tender. We
estimate that over the past ten years, Martinez has been able to dispose of somewhere between five and ten million pounds, but that leaves him with another eight, perhaps nine million still
secreted in Argentina. Once we realized there was nothing we could do to alter the Bank of