Salomon Smolianoff was born to a Jewish family in Kremenchuk, Ukraine. He studied painting in the Russian Empire, but he had to leave the country in 1922 because his parents were on the wrong side of the Soviet Revolution. He went across Europe, was married in Italy, and finally tried to start a new life in Germany, where he met a counterfeiter and decided to become one himself. He was wanted by several European police forces prior to the outbreak of World War II. In 1939 Bernhard Krüger, future SS Sturmbannführer head of Operation Bernhard, put him behind bars. He was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and made himself useful to the S.S. guards as a portraitist and artist. He was selected for Operation Bernhard, transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944, and eventually to the Ebensee site of the Mauthausen camp network, where he was liberated by the US Army on 6 May 1945. All traces of the master counterfeiter Smolianoff were lost after his liberation. He was soon on international "Wanted" lists as a counterfeiter, but he is also believed to have forged emigration papers for Jews trying to go to Palestine.