What was Operation Bernhard? True story behind Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man

Since it began airing all the way back in 2013, Peaky Blinders has brushed up against real history a number of times – with historical figures including Winston Churchill and British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley among those to have had prominent roles in the series.

It's only fitting, then, that new big screen spin-off The Immortal Man also draws on real events.

The film is set during the Second World War – which creator Steven Knight said had always been the end point he'd envisaged – and sees the Peakys becoming involved with Operation Bernhard, a sinister exercise that took place during the conflict but has rarely been reported on.

While the new characters themselves are fictional on this occasion – there's no sign of Churchill and Moseley in the action – the mission is very much real, and Knight spent plenty of time looking into the true history before writing it into the film.

"He always picks these obscure parts of history and weaves the Peakys into it," Tommy Shelby star Cillian Murphy explained to Radio Times on the red carpet at the film's premiere in Birmingham, adding that he had never heard of the "fascinating" story before Knight penned the scripts.

So what exactly was Operation Bernhard? And how does it factor into the Peaky Blinders movie? Read on for everything you need to know.

What was Operation Bernhard? True story behind Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man

Our first indication of Operation Bernhard in the film comes in the very opening scenes, when we see a huge number of British bank notes being printed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany.

A little later, new character Beckett (Tim Roth) – a Nazi sympathiser – attempts to recruit Tommy's son Duke (Barry Keoghan) into the scheme, explaining that the plan is to end the war by flooding the UK with bank notes.

"It's a story that not many people know," Steven Knight explained at a Celebrating Peaky Blinders Q&A at the BFI a week before the film's release. "But Operation Bernhard was when the Nazis tried to... when it was just Britain standing against them, and America was not involved in the war, they wanted to end the war by flooding Britain with currency."

He added: "And so they got people at Sachsenhausen concentration camp – people there were selected because of previous work that they'd done – and they got them to forge something like 350 million pounds of British currency."

The idea, he explained, was that if Britain was flooded with this currency it would break the country's economy and as a result turn the war decisively in Germany's favour.

"And they nearly did it," he added. "They nearly succeeded."

Knight continued: "The first plan was to just drop it from planes. [But] they then thought that they would do it through criminal organisations. People who wouldn't ask the question about, 'Is this a good thing to do? Is this a patriotic thing to do?'

"And it was all obviously kept secret, but the Bank of England stopped people using 10 and 20 pound notes from 1942 at the end of the war. They changed the design of most bank notes because there were so many of these forged bank notes in the currency. But of course, it was a massive, great big secret at the time.

"But it's true, and so what I've done is taken that as sort of a starting point... or how did that not happen?"

Are any other real events featured in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man?

While most of the other events in the film – including the Shelby family drama – are fictional, one other key event in the film is very much based on real events: the bombing by the German Luftwaffe of a Birmingham Small Arms factory in Small Heath on 19 November 1940.

The attack – which tragically saw 53 workers killer and many others injured – is depicted in the opening scenes of the film, while in the closing moments on screen text explains that the film has been dedicated to all those who lost their life that day.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is released in cinemas 6 March. The movie will stream on Netflix from 20 March – sign up from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media. The Peaky Blinders series is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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