Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man premiered in select UK cinemas on March 6, 2026, with a Netflix global release scheduled for March 20. It is set in Birmingham in 1940, placing Tommy Shelby at the center of a Nazi counterfeiting operation — specifically, Germany’s real “Operation Bernhard,” which used Jewish concentration camp prisoners to forge British banknotes and destabilize the wartime economy. The film has been praised by critics for its visual ambition and Cillian Murphy’s performance. What it has not been scrutinized for is the conceptual problem at its core: using a real, documented atrocity against Jewish people as a plot device for a gangster action thriller is not historical drama. It is exploitation dressed as entertainment.
The Wrong Narrative
The mainstream coverage — from Esquire to Digital Spy to SF Chronicle — has focused almost entirely on the spectacle. Does Murphy bring enough gravitas? Does the film justify the transition from six TV seasons to a feature format? Is the Birmingham period atmosphere convincing? These are reasonable questions about craft. They are also a deliberate avoidance of a more uncomfortable one: why does a Peaky Blinders film need Operation Bernhard as its antagonist?
Operation Bernhard was real. Between 1942 and 1945, the SS forced approximately 140 Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp to produce forged British pounds — one of the most sophisticated forgery operations in history, documented extensively by survivors and historians. The operation was not a colorful wartime espionage story. It was a system of forced slave labor designed to fund German war operations while simultaneously undermining Allied economic stability. The prisoners were murdered in stages as the operation concluded. Using it as backdrop for Tommy Shelby’s fifth act is a choice that demands justification, and so far, the reviews have not asked for one.
Historical Drama vs. Historical Decor
There is a clear distinction between historical fiction that interrogates the past — think Schindler’s List, The Zone of Interest, Son of Saul — and historical fiction that uses the past as an aesthetic setting for plots that could, with minor adjustments, unfold anywhere. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man belongs to the second category. The Nazis are antagonists not because the film has something to say about Nazism or its victims, but because Nazis are the go-to signifier of unambiguous evil in British period drama. They are there to give Tommy Shelby a foe worthy of his legend, while the actual human cost of Operation Bernhard remains, conveniently, in the background.
According to Wikipedia’s documentary entry on the film, the movie also incorporates the real bombing of the BSA factory in Small Heath, Birmingham. Two genuine historical atrocities — one against British civilians, one against Jewish concentration camp prisoners — absorbed and reconfigured to serve as production decoration for a franchise sequel is not historical sensitivity. It is historical strip-mining.
What This Actually Means
The problem is not that Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is bad filmmaking. By all critical accounts, it is competent to excellent within its own genre terms. The problem is that British entertainment — and its critics — have developed a comfortable tolerance for using the Holocaust and its adjacent atrocities as reliable plot engines without asking whether those atrocities deserve better. Operation Bernhard’s victims were real people with documented names and testimonies. Tommy Shelby is a fictional Birmingham gangster. The gap between those two things should be larger than the film is willing to make it.
Background
Operation Bernhard was a WWII Nazi counterfeiting scheme that produced approximately nine million forged British banknotes. The Jewish prisoners forced to produce the forgeries were kept alive only as long as they were useful, and many were killed when the operation ended in 1945. Their story is documented in detail by survivor testimony and historian analysis.