|
|
|
Thread | Display Modes | Share |
June 2nd, 2017 | #1 |
News Bot
|
Why I believe the king of the Nazi hunters, Simon Wiesenthal, was a fraud
Why I believe the king of the Nazi hunters, Simon Wiesenthal, was a fraud
By Guy Walters For millions around the world, Simon Wiesenthal is seen as a hero. Often credited with bringing to justice some 1,100 war criminals, the Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor is regarded almost as a saint, a man who did more than any government to lock up the perpetrators of some of the worst crimes the world has witnessed. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the recipient of a knighthood and more than 50 other honours, Wiesenthal is particularly remembered for his role in tracking down the notorious architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. After he died at the age of 96 in September 2005, the eulogies poured in from around the world. Wiesenthal was lauded as the ‘permanent representative of the victims’, a man who had not only sought justice, but prided himself on never forgetting his six million ‘clients’, as he called those who died in the Holocaust. Those who read his memoirs could only marvel at his wartime heroism and incredible escapes from death at the hands of the Nazis. It seemed as if Wiesenthal’s mission was almost divinely given, the gods sparing his life for some higher purpose. The accounts of his hunts for fugitives were no less sensational, as Wiesenthal told how he engaged in a battle of wits against the sinister postwar Nazi networks and their sympathisers. It was the ultimate feelgood story of revenge, and the world lapped it up. TV programmes and movies were made, and soon Wiesenthal became a household name, a symbol for the triumph of hope over evil. Those who thrilled at his life story can now do so once more, thanks to a new biography written by the Israeli historian Tom Segev. The figure who emerges in the book is far more complex than one might expect. Dr Segev shows that so much of Wiesenthal’s account of his life was the product of exaggeration and self-mythologising. Appearing on Radio 4’s Today programme this week, the author said Wiesenthal was ‘a storyteller, a man who lived between reality and fantasy’. He excused Wiesenthal’s inclination to fabricate stories about his past,saying it was his way of making it easier to deal with the real atrocities he had experienced in the concentration camps. I’m sorry, but this compassionate approach simply does not wash with me. For the truth is that the great Nazi hunter is far, far worse than Dr Segev makes out. In my view, Simon Wiesenthal was a liar and a fraud. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he was one of the biggest conmen of the 20th century. I spent four years working on a history of Nazi-hunting that was published last year, and the material I gathered on Wiesenthal was enough to make me scream out loud. When I started my book, I too believed that the great man was just that — great. But when I looked at all his memoirs, biographies and original archive material, I realised that, like so many others, the image I had built up of Simon Wiesenthal was hopelessly incorrect. There were too many distortions and inconsistencies, too many outright lies — none of which could be explained away by sympathetic psycho-babble offered by the likes of Dr Segev. The fact is that Wiesenthal lied about nearly everything in his life. Let us, for example, start at the beginning and look at his educational record. If you visit the website of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, you’ll learn that he ‘applied for admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov’, but was turned down ‘because of quota restrictions on Jewish students’. The website then claims that he went to the Technical University of Prague, ‘from which he received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932’. Other biographies — published during Wiesenthal’s lifetime — state that he did in fact go to Lvov, in either 1934 or 1935, and gained a diploma as an architectural engineer in 1939. All of these accounts are rubbish. The Lvov State Archives have no record of Simon Wiesenthal having studied at Lvov Technical University. The archives have records for other students from that period, but not for Wiesenthal — and there were no quota restrictions on Jewish students at that time. Neither did he graduate from Prague. Although he matriculated on February 21, 1929, Wiesenthal never completed his degree. He passed his first state examination on February 15, 1932, and then he left that same year. Despite a lack of academic credentials, he would fraudulently use his supposed engineering diploma on his letter paper for the rest of his life. During the war, Wiesenthal claimed to have spent years in and out of a succession of concentration camps. Although he certainly spent time in camps such as Mauthausen, he also said he had been in Auschwitz — a claim for which there is no record. Then there is his supposed career as a brave partisan. In two of his memoirs, he claims to have joined a group of partisans after escaping from a camp in October 1943. According to an interview he gave the American army in 1948, he claimed he was immediately made a lieutenant ‘on the basis of my intellect’. He was soon promoted to major, and he was instrumental in ‘building bunkers and fortification lines’. ‘We had fabulous bunker constructions,’ he said. ‘My rank was not so much as a strategic expert as a technical expert.’ One only needs a basic grasp of World War II military history to know that Wiesenthal’s claims are highly dubious. Partisan groups do not build ‘ fabulous bunker constructions’, they instead rely on mobility to outwit the enemy. As a Jew, it is also highly unlikely that he would have been made an officer in such a group, which was usually anti-semitic. Wiesenthal would also give another account of his experience in the partisans, in which he joined a more ad hoc and smaller band — hardly one to build bunkers and fortifications or have a formalised promotion structure. Since there exist at least four wildly differing accounts of Wiesenthal’s activities between October 1943 and the middle of 1944, serious questions about what he actually did should surely be raised. Some of those who doubted his version of events — such as the lateformer Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky — went so far as to accuse Wiesenthal repeatedly in the 1970s and the 1980s of being a collaborator with the Gestapo. Kreisky’s claims were supported by unsubstantiated evidence provided by the Polish and Soviet governments, and when Wiesenthal took Kreisky to court, it was Wiesenthal who won. Two affidavits made by former members of the German army also asserted that the Nazi hunter was a collaborator, but such claims must be treated with extreme caution. Smearing Wiesenthal is a popular pastime for anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, so-called ‘Revisionists’ and other such cranks. But the multiplicity of conflicting accounts demands that questions about the authenticity of his story must be raised by those who, like me, have no agenda. However, I have no compunction in stating that the biggest lie he spun was over his involvement in the hunt and eventual capture of Adolf Eichmann, a suppo ----- snip ----- read full article at source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...hal-fraud.html |
June 2nd, 2017 | #2 | |
Senior Member
|
Quote:
__________________
Vladimir Putin's Russia is being attacked by the very same forces that attacked Hitler's Germany, namely the Jews. The fate of the world hangs on Putin defeating the Jews. |
|
June 2nd, 2017 | #3 | |
Senior Member
|
Quote:
__________________
Vladimir Putin's Russia is being attacked by the very same forces that attacked Hitler's Germany, namely the Jews. The fate of the world hangs on Putin defeating the Jews. |
|
June 2nd, 2017 | #4 | ||
.
Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 3,923
|
Quote:
Quote:
Last edited by Dan Hadaway; June 2nd, 2017 at 11:58 AM. |
||
August 29th, 2017 | #5 |
Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2017
Posts: 12
|
This is the man who says that he was at a death camp , and they took him out to a hospital where he received an operation on his eye (saving his vision) then brought him BACK to the death camp.
|
August 29th, 2017 | #6 |
Junior Member
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 149
|
Same with that Anne Frank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Frank Those nasty Germans helped him by shoving him in an hospital when he was unwell. |
August 29th, 2017 | #7 |
Junior Member
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 149
|
Simon Wiesenthal is not far off a trademark.
The jews used to sell is name for his centres. |
Share |
Thread | |
Display Modes | |
|