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It's the glinting mountain of Fool’s Gold, commissioned by the Fuhrer, that flooded into war-torn Britain in a bid to break the bank.

Fake, high value coins were churned out in their millions, used to melt our stretched economy, pay foreign agents and finance the Nazi war machine abroad.

And one well-known Walsall collector believes the bogus bullion is still out there. Many of the sovereigns stashed away by Midland family’s as an investment may be the residue of the Reich’s counterfeit industry.

For the veteran dealer, who has hidden his identity, fearing the bombshell findings will spark a backlash from fellow dealers, a chance meeting in India began the global hunt for Nazi gold.

There, a German woman with ancestral links to Hitler’s hierarchy, asked the 77-year-old to value a rare James II guinea – a coin worth over £2,500 in good condition. It was a fake: a near perfect fake, but a dud, nonetheless. And its provenance led our man straight to Friedrich Schwend, the Nazi industrialist tasked with destabilising Allied powers through a stream of Mickey Mouse money.

He was the Facist “fence” for near undetectable coins and notes, crafted by master forgers forced to slave round the clock in Blocks 18 and 19 of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

The Black Country coin expert, working with private investigator Peter Gill, has now released a book – “Operation Midas”, the name given to the complex coin con – on his two-year probe into Hitler’s money laundering operation.

And he discovered that through Midas and Operation Bernhard – the paper money side of the worldwide scam – the Nazi’s came perilously close to achieving their goal: blitzing the bank of England.

Our man, dubbed “Max” in the book, explained: “The estimated value of counterfeit banknotes printed by Operation Bernhard was £150 million – near perfect copies despite two hurdles the Bank of England thought were insurmountable.

“British notes were made from rag that could only be obtained from India, where the British had total dominance since the 18th century. They cracked that through South American contacts.

“There was also the problem of the numbering system, of which only the Bank of England was privy. If any note did not correspond to the date, years of circulation and number of the note in question, payment would be refused.”

With the feared Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Reich’s barbaric Final Solution, pulling the strings and former textile engineer Bernhard Kruger overseeing production, they cracked the numerical code.

“The notes are perfect,” nodded Max, clutching a duff wartime fiver, “even down to a slight fleck, placed deliberately by the Bank of England, on the ‘five’. But they made one mistake.

“They solely produced £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes, which, in those days, was big money. A fiver was a week’s wages for your average man.

“What really concerned the Bank of England was the possibility – even probability – that the Reich would print 10 shilling and £1 notes that would attract little attention.”

Amazingly, the government had already put into place a plan to thwart the expected over-the-counter plague of counterfeit cash.

Board game manufacturers John Waddington’s, based in Wakefield, were placed on standby to produce new, replacement 10 shilling and £1 notes.

In those bleak war years, Britain was a whisker away from trading in Monopoly money.

But while the fruits of Operation Bernhard were burned long ago, the faux riches spewed out in sadistic sweat shops by Operation Midas remain. And the rogue coins still foil many an expert.

“The James II guinea worn by that woman in an Indian hotel back in 2011 was the best counterfeit coin I’ve seen,” said Max.

“For a gold coin, there are three tests of authenticity. The weight test, which eradicates all but the thickest gold plate. The acid test, where nitric acid burns through anything that isn’t the real McCoy. The scratch test which reveals non-precious metal under the gold.

“Not surprisingly, the latter two tests are seldom used because they deface the coins. Nazi gold, however, passes all three. It’s still out there and dealers know it, many getting round accusations of selling forgeries by slapping an ‘as seen’ notice on gold coins for sale.

“In layman’s terms, that’s a ‘buyer beware’ warning.”

The Fuhrer’s funny money was destined for a global audience – and it was needed: Reichsmarks were only accepted in Nazi occupied territories and Hitler’s spies needed to grease palms abroad.

For an evil empire that had dabbled and failed in the medieval, “base metal to gold” art of alchemy – it had bought into a scheme to turn volcanic rock into the precious metal and got its figures burned – crafting near perfect imitations was the next best thing.

“Paper money has a life expectancy,” explained Max. “Gold coins do not.”

Concentration camp craftsmen set about copying antique and modern currency: sovereigns, US dollars, British jubilee pieces, Russian 37.5 roubles and Spanish 100 Pesetas.

Heydrich was a monster, but he possessed the business acumen to realise gold is gold, regardless of age or the country stamped on it.

Max, his home crammed with examples of Hitler’s duff dosh, gathered from across Europe, is quick to point out the counterfeit cash cold war was started by Britain.

The Germans just happened to be a lot better at it.

“At the beginning of the war,” he said, “the RAF dropped tens of thousands of counterfeit clothing coupons over German cities. It was a foolhardy move, the result of bad intelligence because, at that time, clothing wasn’t rationed.

“Later they tried dropping two Reichmark notes, but they were so bad the German people simply handed them in to police. In Germany, this must have triggered the concept of a similar, but more elaborate operation, carried out with Teutonic efficiency.

“There were many setbacks and false starts, but every single one was overcome.”

But what of the men behind Operations Bernhard and Midas?

Heydrich died a week after being attacked by a team of crack, British trained Czech and Slovac troops in Prague on May 27, 1942.

Berhard Kruger worked for the post-war German government as a consultant on rural housing.

Friedrich Schwend fled to Peru, where he lived the rest of his life in luxury, his personal wealth including one-and-a-half million franks in the Vaduz branch of the Bank of Lichtenstein, a million Swiss franks holding in a Trieste property company, 350,000 marks ploughed into an Austrian import and export firm and 100,000 marks earned from Operation Bernhard.

For Kruger and Schwend, crime paid. Handsomely.

And the traces of their audacious scheme to scupper our economy remain.

Max has asked a question of those readers who have snapped-up gold coins as a nest egg. Hold them in your hand, look at them.

Can you be sure they’re not Nazi gold?