In the throes of World War II, was George Soros a Nazi sympathizer who worked to round up Jews and steal their property? Those are the accusations Roseanne Barr and Donald Trump Jr. have buttressed on Twitter in the last few days.
Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you!I Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?
— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018
These and similar claims rely mainly on three sources: a 60 Minutes interview with Soros, the autobiography of Soros’s father, and an assortment of Soros’s personal statements on his boyhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
Soros was a toddler when Hitler was appointed chancellor and just 7 years old when Germany annexed Austria. When the Nazi regime began occupying Hungary in 1944, he was 13.
As anti-Semitism grew, George’s father Tivadar changed the Jewish family’s surname to Soros. Tivadar secured false Christian identity papers for his family. As Tivadar notes in his autobiography Masquerade, during the occupation of Hungary George was tasked by the Jewish Council, as all Jewish kids were, to deliver summons for Jewish families “to report tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock at the Rabbinical Seminary in Rokk Szildrd Street. Please bring with you a blanket, and food for two days.”
According to his father, George told the recipients not to oblige with the demand. Once Tivadar found out about the summons, he ordered his son to no longer deliver them.
George’s account varies a bit from Tivadar’s retelling. In a 1994 interview with Michael Lewis for the New Republic, Soros recalled that his father told him to warn people to disobey the summons lest they be deported:
The Jewish Council asked the little kids to hand out the deportation notices. I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper. It was three or four lines. It said report to the rabbi seminary at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. Bring a blanket and food for twenty-four hours. And I was given a list of names. I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it, you see. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, “You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported.” I’m not sure to what extent he knew they were going to be gassed. I did what my father said. There was one man I shall not forget. I took it to him and told him what my father had said. He said: “Tell your father that I am a law-abiding citizen, that I have always been a law-abiding citizen and I am not going to start breaking the law now.” And that stayed with me forever.
During the later part of this tumultuous time, George went for a few weeks to live with a government official whose duty it was to take inventory of Hungarian Jews who had been divested of their estates. The official was not only helping to protect Soros but also his own Jewish wife.
Soros’s biographer and his father’s account both confirm that George went along for one of these inventory trips in Budapest, assuming the role as “godson” to the official. While Tivadar claims in his autobiography that George “even helped with the inventory” the biography of Soros by Michael Kaufman suggests that Soros did not assist with the inventory. All of this occurred while George Soros, a Jew, was hiding under a false identity as a young teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary. As other fact checkers have noted, this is the only account of anything relating to George Soros and the inventory of dispossessed Jews.
Many who peddle the “George Soros was a Nazi” conspiracy rely on a 60 Minutes interview with Soros from 1998. During the interview, Soros was asked if he “helped in the confiscation of the property from the Jews” to which he responded “yes, that’s right.” Later on in that same line of questioning, Soros says that he “was only a spectator” and “had no role in taking away that property.”
Claims that Soros was a Nazi sympathizer or that he helped “round up Jewish people” and stole “their wealth” are quite inaccurate. Perhaps for Barr, it was just the Zolpidem talking.
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