Counterfeiting of paper money probably began long ago, shortly after its inception. I was attracted by the seeming simplicity of the process. Indeed, paper money is not a coin that requires sophisticated equipment, appropriate alloys and chemicals, and certain qualifications to counterfeit. And then what is simpler: copy the drawing on a paper rectangle - and you are rich … However, this apparent simplicity attracted not only ordinary swindlers, but also the mighty of this world. It is clear that they (or rather, their henchmen) did not bother themselves with drawing individual pictures by hand, but set matters on a grand scale.
Easy money is the worst punishment
But, observing the historical sequence, it would still be logical to start with coin counterfeiting as an older means of payment. For centuries, only gold and silver coins were minted. The state that issued the money was responsible for the accuracy of the weight and the sample. The denomination of the coin has always been slightly higher than the actual value of the metal from which it was made. This difference provided the so-called monetary income of the treasury. And some rulers tried to increase this income. They simply engaged in falsification - they reduced the weight of coins, added ligature to the metal (low-value impurities).
Especially famous in this field was the French monarch Philip IV, who went down in history as a “king-counterfeiter”. The court alchemist of the English king Henry VI once discovered that copper rubbed with mercury turns silvery. With his discovery, he hurried to the king, and he, without hesitation, ordered the issue of a huge number of such false silver coins.
And the German princes of the 17th century have completely lost their conscience. They issued counterfeit coins without any restrictions. And when the time came to collect taxes, the princes refused to accept forgeries, demanding only coins of earlier issues. Apparently, it was then that the unhappy saying was born: "Easy money for the country is the worst punishment than hard wars." The minting of counterfeit money was also used as an instrument of foreign policy. The Czech king Louis II in 1517 issued coins similar to the Polish half-pennies, but containing a very small amount of silver. This "currency" brought down the Polish market. At the beginning of the 17th century, Poland and Sweden were at war with Russia - and both counterfeit Russian coins were minted.
Russia itself did not lag behind in this ignoble craft. On December 18, 1812, Arakcheev, in a letter to the Minister of Finance Guryev, conveyed the highest order: upon the army's advance abroad, set the content "for one and a half rubles in silver, counting a Dutch chervonets at three rubles in silver." Why was the salary counted in Dutch ducats? The answer is simple. For a century and a half, Russia itself minted these same Dutch chervonets, with which it made foreign payments. In official papers, there was an evasive name for them "known coin". Obviously, Dutch ducks were very popular in those days, because exactly the same coins were counterfeited by England.
All this, as they say, is still in bloom. Berries began with widespread use of paper money, although they existed as such before.
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His majesty's engraver
At the end of the 18th century, a revolution broke out in France. And the emigrants, loyal to the idea of monarchy, did not forge the notes of the Convention because of the good life. They were doing this at specially equipped factories in Switzerland and England. After just one battle on the Quiberon Peninsula, the revolutionary troops captured 10 million false livres! Later, this French experience served the most famous Frenchman in history, Napoleon. From 1806 to 1809, he ordered to counterfeit Austrian and Prussian money, achieving the collapse of the enemy's economy, in 1810 - English, and then it came to the Russians. How it happened is described in his memoirs by Joseph Lal, an engraver of the main military administration of France, to whom the Special Administration of the Emperor's Secret Cabinet turned.
Lal writes that at the beginning of 1810, an unknown customer came to him and asked him to accurately copy the text printed in London. The work was completed on time and so well that it delighted the customer. There was no point in encrypting further. Revealing his incognito, the customer invited Lal to the police ministry, where he was asked to make a cliché of an English bank. Lal did not disappoint and soon received a similar order for Russian fakes. In just a month, Lal and his employees made about 700 cliches - the production of forgeries was planned on a grand scale. The printing house was equipped in Montparnasse, and was supervised by the brother of Napoleon's secretary. Jean-Jacques Feng. There was, according to Lalle, a special room where the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust. Ready-made banknotes were thrown into this dust, after which they were mixed with a leather broom. It was necessary (we quote Lal) “in order toso that they become soft, take on an ashy hue and look as if they have already passed through many hands."
We do not know what the quality of the English "money" produced by the company "Lal and Company" was, but with the Russians they could not achieve a decent quality. It turned out to be easy to recognize fakes. The French printed banknotes on paper of better quality than the Russians; on the fakes images of medallions, which are almost invisible on the originals, stood out quite clearly. The letters on the fakes were engraved more clearly than on the originals, and in some games direct mistakes were made - for example, the letter "l" instead of "d" in the word "state".
However, one way or another, Napoleon's swindle gained momentum as the French approached the capital of Russia - printing houses were opened in Dresden, Warsaw and, finally, in Moscow itself, at the Preobrazhensky cemetery. When, after the war, our Senate changed banknotes, among the 830 million in circulation, more than 70 million Napoleonic counterfeits were revealed.
There are no gentlemen in the war
Where there is war, there is, as a rule, economic sabotage with the help of counterfeit money. During the American Civil War, southerners counterfeited northerners' money. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Land of the Rising Sun printed counterfeit rubles. And on the eve of the First World War, the money of the coming enemy was made in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov reported in a letter to the Director of the Police Department Dzhunkovsky that in Russia “500-ruble state credit notes, printed on specially prepared paper with a watermark, were distributed in the same way that was used exclusively by the Expedition for the preparation of state papers and was considered to still unconditionally secured government credit tickets against counterfeiting. In the archives of the Special Section of the Russian Police Department, the protocol of the interrogation of the Austrian prisoner of war Joseph Hetl was found. The prisoner said that his school friend Alexander Erdeli works at the Vienna Military Geographical Institute, where counterfeit Russian banknotes in denominations of 10, 25, 50 and 100 rubles are printed. His testimony was confirmed by multiple seizures of such papers in the Volga region, the Caucasus, Irkutsk, Kursk and other cities.
The minister's plan fails
Counterfeit money escapades continued after the war. Germany, Austria and Hungary could not, and did not want to overcome the temptation. On Austrian territory, for example, Czech banknotes were printed. Although their quality was high, the agent was arrested while trying to sell - the operation became known in advance to the Czech intelligence.
And the famous politician Gustav Stresemann, who was the German foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, developed a plan to counterfeit francs, with a further focus on pounds sterling. The practical implementation of the project was entrusted to the Hungarian prince Windischgrez. The brilliant swindler studied the technique of falsification at the factory of the German intelligence in Cologne. One of Windischgrez's henchmen, Colonel of the General Staff Jankovic, went to Paris, where he got acquainted on the spot with the peculiarities of packing money by the French Bank. The bank notes were ready in 1925, they were kept in the Hungarian embassies in a number of countries. Jankovic went to Holland and in The Hague presented a thousand-franc ticket to the bank. He was unlucky: the attentive cashier immediately recognized the fake and called the police.
Yankovic was arrested. The Hungarian ambassador notified the government of the incident, and on a prearranged signal, the agents destroyed the evidence - doused it with gasoline and burned the entire stock of forgeries. But the French Bank saw a serious danger in the Jankovic case. He sent detectives to Budapest, and they managed to unearth a lot. A major international scandal was brewing. To ward off the blow from the government, Windischgratz and Jankovic took all the blame and were sentenced to prison in 1926.
A thief stole a club from a thief
We deliberately did not touch in these notes the activities of Hitler's counterfeiters who printed pounds sterling and dollars in the framework of Operation Bernhard. Books have been written about this operation, documentaries and feature films have been shot. We will mention only one curiosity associated with it. For the Third Reich, he worked as a paid agent at the English Embassy in Turkey under the pseudonym Cicero. It transmitted information of operational importance, but the Germans could not use it due to the rapidly changing military situation. After the war, Cicero found out that the pounds that German intelligence paid him with were fake. And so it happened that the Germans paid for information that was useless for them with counterfeit money.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №42. Author: Andrey Bystrov
