The grim German movie The Counterfeiters , written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, opens intriguingly in a bleak, rundown Monte Carlo days after the end of the Second World War. A weary, poorly dressed man carrying a small case full of money books into a smart hotel. He has a new suit of clothes made, goes in a dinner jacket to the casino, plays recklessly and picks up a high-priced whore. While having sex, she is shocked to see a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. Why is he here and apparently bent on losing? The answer is given in flashback form, starting in 1936.

The antihero is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Russian Jew celebrated in the underworld as a master forger. Arrested in 1936 by Inspector Herzog, head of the Berlin CID fraud squad, by 1939 he is in the dreadful Mauthausen camp in Austria, wearing the green triangle as a habitual criminal and the yellow star as a Jew. His skills making sketches and portraits of guards and propagandistic murals bring him special privileges.

Then in 1944, he's moved to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, where, appropriately, his prewar nemesis Herzog is in charge of a top-secret forgery unit. Their principal task is to produce vast quantities of pounds and dollars as a way of financing the war and undermining the British and American economies.

This is a fictionalised version of a true story not unlike that of Eddie Chapman, the British criminal released from jail in the occupied Channel Islands on condition that he became a Nazi spy. A respectable Jewish banker from Hamburg brought in for his professional skills despises Salomon as a professional criminal, while a communist master printer from the Resistance views him with contempt for his determination to survive.

Salomon and his fellow inmates are faced with a choice. They can collaborate, thus helping the German war effort, they can refuse and be shot, or they can compromise, walking a tightrope of subtle prevarication. When the Germans quit Sachsenhausen, the moderately privileged forgers must justify themselves before the ill-treated, emaciated prisoners from the rest of the camp. This is a fascinating, low-key movie about moral choices and life-and-death decisions made in terrible conditions. Few will emerge from it without considerable respect for its antihero and without asking how they themselves would have acted.