The shocking real-life story behind the Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has shot to number one on Netflix as people tune back into the series which ended four years ago, and the film is actually based on shocking real-life events.

The Immortal Man is set in WWII, when Cillian Murphy’s character, Tommy Shelby, comes out of retirement to take down his own son Duke, who has become the leader of the Peaky Blinders and taken it down the wrong path.

It’s based on a real-life plot by the Germans called Operation Bernhard that not many people know about, where the Nazis forged British banknotes to initially collapse the British economy, and later fund German intelligence operations. It was named after SS Major Bernhard Krüger.

The Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight told Town & Country: “The history in this was the Operation Bernhard, the true story of the forging of the [British] money in a concentration camp. Parts of the plot were kept secret by the government for 50 years because at the time they didn’t want people to lose faith in the British currency.

Credit: Netflix

“But the fact is that the Germans did try to swamp the economy with money and they succeeded to an extent whereby the Bank of England withdrew 10-pound notes in the middle of the war and after the war redesigned the currency because there were so many forgeries around it.”

As explained by Knight, the Germans brought all kinds of people to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who they thought would be useful in creating these forgeries, including people who had done design, were good at art and worked with lithographs. They are believed to have created £132.6 million to £300 million worth of fake British banknotes from 1940 to 1945.

“And they were so meticulous about the writing and having people rub the bills so that they didn’t look brand new. They changed the pH of the water that they used because German water had a different PH in order to, when they were making the pulp for the money. It was incredible. And the Bank of England said it was pretty impossible to tell the difference between a forged note and a real note. They said it was the best ever forgeries that they’d ever come across,” he explained.

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Operation Bernard was classified for decades after it took place, and the creator specifically wanted to use a part of history that was lesser known because real, hidden history always tends to be more “chaotic”.

Credit: Netflix

The bombing of the Small Arms Factory in Birmingham at the start of the film also happened in real life, and Knight’s own mother worked at the factory. “That’s a real event. It really happened in 1940. And my mother was working at the BSA at the time and she was loading explosives into artillery shells, but she wasn’t there that night,” he said.

“She wasn’t on the shift, but she might have been. And so that story was always told to me about that night and that bombing. And I just thought I wanted to use that as the catalyst pretty much for how the whole thing runs up.”

The creator decided to dedicate the whole film to the workers who died, because they were offered to go to bomb shelters, but decided to risk their lives and carry on working instead, because they wanted to help the war effort.

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Featured image credit: Netflix