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As a prominent political activist and supporter of left-wing causes, Hungarian-born billionaire financier George Soros has frequently been the target of smear campaigns, and none more odious than the persistent — and false — claim that Soros, a Jew, was a Nazi sympathizer, collaborator, and/or paramilitary officer during World War II. That Soros was only nine years old (born in 1930) when the war broke out and all of 14 when Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945 hasn't dampened his detractors' enthusiasm for spreading these rumors, including the absurd claim, which first surfaced in November 2016, that Soros literally served as an officer of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) in Germany. Here are two examples via Twitter: This allegation continues to make the social media rounds in the form of a black-and-white photograph of a young man — supposedly Soros — wearing an SS uniform (see above), accompanied by some version of this caption: Wow, indeed. But given his age, Soros couldn't have joined the SS (whose minimum age requirement was 17) even if he had wanted to. Moreover, as a Hungarian Jew he couldn't have met the SS requirement for pure Aryan heritage. Quite to the contrary, Soros and his entire family were obliged to hide their identities and pose as Christians to avoid being forcibly housed in ghettos, interned in concentration camps, deported, or killed during the 10-month Nazi occupation of Hungary beginning in 1944. The miscaptioned photo is easily debunked using a reverse image search. The young man in the Waffen-SS uniform is actually Oskar Groening, a Nazi who served at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942 through the end of the war. More than 70 years after this photograph was taken, Groening was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews. Was Soros a Nazi Collaborator? It is also claimed that Soros survived the German occupation of Budapest by becoming a Nazi collaborator. Fox News pundit Glenn Beck alleged in November 2010, for example, that the 14-year-old Soros help[ed] the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors, and, worse (in Beck's view), was unrepentant about it: I don't want to question the 14-year-old, Beck disingenuously stated during a series of broadcasts devoted to painting Soros as an evil puppet-master of the left. I would have, however, liked to question the 80-year-old man who has never once said he regretted it, he added. Central to Beck's case were quotes and clips from a 1998 60 Minutes interview (which can be viewed in its entirety here), an excerpt from which was also used as the centerpiece in a commentary on the conspiracist web site InfoWars.com in which host Alex Jones claimed that the teenaged Soros helped round up thousands of people and stole hundreds of millions of dollars from Hungarian Jews on behalf of the Nazi occupiers.Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza (who has gone so far as to compare the 14-year-old George Soros to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele) revived the Nazi collaborator claim in his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, doubling down on it in a social media campaign to promote book sales: Other conservative and alt-right media figures followed suit: Yet the simple truth is that George Soros neither said nor did anything resembling what he has been accused of. In no sense was Soros, who turned 14 years old not long after the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, a Nazi collaborator. At no time did he confiscate (or help confiscate) the property of Jews, identify Jews to the Nazis, or help round up people targeted for deportation or extermination by the Germans (to answer just a few of the accusations leveled against him). And although Soros did attest during the infamous 60 Minutes interview that he regrets nothing about the time of German occupation, he also said it is precisely because he didn't do any of the things attributed to him that his conscience is clear. The 60 Minutes Interview The 60 Minutes interview is problematic in many regards, not least because Soros's testimony comes across as confused and contradictory. After assenting to Kroft's (inaccurate) statement that he helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews, a minute later Soros says he was only a spectator and played no role in that confiscation: Soros's biographer, Michael T. Kaufman, described Soros as visibly dumbfounded by Kroft's prosecutorial line of questioning during the interview. Kaufman addressed the claim that Soros was involved in confiscating Jewish property in his book, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (Knopf, 2002). While it's true, Kaufman wrote, that one of the jobs delegated to young George's temporary protector (a Hungarian bureaucrat named Baumbach) was taking inventory of Jewish properties already confiscated by the Nazis, the extent of Soros's participation was accompanying Baumbach on one of those assignments: George's father, Tivadar Soros, provided a similar account of the incident in his 1965 autobiography, Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Occupied Hungary (note: Tivadar Soros gave the name of the ministry official as Baufluss, but Soros confirmed to us that the correct name is Baumbach): He even helped with the inventory, Tivadar Soros wrote. It's a detail one doesn't find in Kaufman's book. Some may rush to cite this as proof that Soros was indeed a collaborator, but given that it occurred on only one occasion, and that Soros was under an imperative to play the part of Baumbach's godson while in the company of actual Nazi collaborators, it demands stretching the meaning of collaborator beyond all reasonable limits. Moreover, these biographical passages demonstrate that Steve Kroft's claim on 60 Minutes that Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews is flat-out false. Tivadar Soros wrote that most of young George's time under Baumbach's care was spent alone in the latter's apartment. Both Tivadar and Kaufman report that George only resided with Baumbach for a short time — a matter of weeks — before Tivadar, concerned that his son's real identity was in danger of exposure, shipped him off to spend the summer of 1944 with his mother (who herself was living under an assumed name at a lakeside resort some distance from Budapest). George Soros spent no further time with Baumbach. Did Soros Serve Jews with Death or Deportation Notices? Another Nazi collaborator trope holds that young George Soros helped send fellow Jews to their deaths by delivering deportation notices on behalf of Budapest's Jewish Council (Judenrat in German), an organization tasked by the Nazis with helping enforce Nazi policies on the Hungarian Jewish population: However, as in the case of the confiscation rumors already discussed, here we find innocuous facts about George Soros's adolescence twisted and exaggerated into a grotesque lie. According to Soros's father, school-age Jewish children were required to run errands for the council. Among those errands (he came to find out) was delivering deportation notices to prominent Jews. But although George did, in fact, spend all of two days as a Jewish Council errand boy, he didn't perform his assigned tasks exactly as ordered, taking it upon himself to warn the recipients of the notices that they ought not to comply: Did Soros Say Helping the Nazis was the Happiest Time of His Life? In a foreword George Soros wrote for a 2001 reprint of Masquerade, he described the ten months of the Nazi occupation as the happiest times of my life: Predictably, this statement has been repurposed by Soros's political enemies, usually in tandem with the false claim that he was a Nazi collaborator, as an admission of moral bankruptcy: But at no time did Soros say helping Nazis was the happiest time of his life. As he has reiterated on numerous occasions, what he was referring to was the exhilaration of surviving the most perilous situation he and his family would ever face, under the guidance and tutelage of his father, whom George Soros saw as a heroic figure. It was his finest hour, Soros said of his father in his 2007 book, The Age of Fallibility: Anti-Defamation League Statement One of the ironies of these attacks on Soros based on his survival of the Nazi occupation is that they use his own (and his father's) candid remembrances of the experience to vilify him. As Holocaust survivor and Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman stated in response to Glenn Beck's attempted takedown of Soros in 2010, regardless of how one feels about the adult George Soros and his politics, the attacks are morally repugnant and unacceptable:
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