It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by Nazi Germany during World War II to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England pound notes.

The film is based on the 1983 Czech-language memoir Komando padělatelů ("The Commando of Counterfeiters") by Adolf Burger, which was published in English as The Devil's Workshop.

Burger was a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation and was later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard.

After checking into an expensive hotel and paying with cash, he takes in the high life of Monte Carlo, successfully gambling in a casino and attracting the attention of a beautiful French woman.

In an effort to secure himself protection and meagre comforts at the camp, he turns his forging skills to portraiture, attracting the attention of the guards, who commission him to paint them and their families in exchange for extra food rations.

Brought in front of the police officer who arrested him in Berlin, he finds himself put together with other prisoners with artistic or printing talents and begins working in a special section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp devoted to forgery.

The film then returns to post-war Monte Carlo, where Sorowitsch, apparently disgusted by the life he is now leading on the currency that he forged for the Nazis, intentionally gambles it all away.

"[8] The Counterfeiters was released (with English subtitles) on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in the United Kingdom by Metrodome Distribution on 17 March 2008, and in the US by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on 5 August 2008.