Holocaust Poseurs

A slightly abridged version of this paper was broadcast on WBCQ, 6160kHz at 10PM and 7490kHz at 11PM New York Time on 18 October 2024. An improved version of the program broadcast on 14 October 2024 on 7490kHz at 8PM New York Time. Download an mp3 file of this show here (right-click, and pick “Save Link As…” from context menu).
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The Ubiquity of False Holocaust Testimony

Recently, I’ve been reading a book published by Yale University Press in 1941, Atrocity Propaganda by James Morgan Read. It’s interesting for not only the exposure of the kind of lying that went on in the First World War, but also the extent to which at least educated people had recovered from that propaganda. They understood that wars are full of lying, all right? So, I want to read you just a little bit of this, a couple of paragraphs from James Read’s book Atrocity Propaganda.

“Not only the newspaper editors and writers were guilty of atrocity mongering. To say only the worst of the enemy was comme il faut [as required]. Norman Hapgood, after returning from a trip to the front in 1915, told of French villagers who, after being rescued from German occupation, asked if it would be all right to say that they were treated well.”

So, the Germans were actually decent to these French peasants, and the French peasants wanted to know if it was okay for them to say that. Continuing:

“Humanitarians and sentimentalists were often responsible for this tendency to invent enormities at the cost of truth. A British general vouches for a pertinent example of this. Certain well-meaning ladies were passing through a British hospital which housed returned prisoners. Good Samaritans, dispensing cigarettes and chocolate, they were also eager to have their worst impressions of the Germans confirmed. Approaching one bedside, the lady in the lead asked, ‘My poor man, you must have been shamefully treated by those vile devils.’ he answer was disappointing. ‘Not so bad, Mom, seeing they was Germans.’ The lady passed on to the next bed, without opening her bag. ‘Oh, you poor creature, how pale and thin you seem to be. I see those brutes have starved you. Now tell me all about it.’ ‘Well, you see, Mom, the way of it was this, Fritz, he didn’t have too much for himself, and we was used to give him a bite now and then from our parcels.’ Once more the lady withdrew, as if personally rebuffed, keeping her bag [of gifts] tightly closed. The next patient, a little Jewish boy who had carefully observed the procedure thus far, knew what she wanted and what he wanted. And when more visitors turned up on the following day, they were able to feast on prison horrors to their heart’s content.”

Concerning the first atrocity stories, well, what he says then is that, at the beginning of the First World War, most people didn’t believe the atrocity stories from the First World War either. But it was the being absolutely barraged with the same lies that convinced the people. That is what he says.

But I wanted to give you that information as an introduction to what I’m going to be discussing today, which is people who lied about their experiences.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke a little bit about Paul Rassinier, the French Marxist resistance operative who spent some time in Buchenwald and Dora labor camp. And he was an early Holocaust revisionist. He knew firsthand that people who had been in Buchenwald or Dora lied and exaggerated about what happened there. They had claimed that there was a gas chamber in that place. He personally knew that there was no gas chamber in that place.

And by the way, now, mainstream history says that there was no gas chamber in that place. Martin Broszat, who was the director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Germany, he actually wrote a letter to Die Zeit, which is a big highbrow weekly news publication. He wrote this letter to Die Zeit, published on the 19th of August 1960, stating that there had been “no gassings in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen or Dachau,” which many people up to that point had believed because of the old war propaganda and because of the kinds of liars that Rassinier called to account in his books.

And I’m going to talk about some similar cases today, which include not only people who embroidered their experience and were actually in a concentration camp, but people who, in some cases, were never in a concentration camp and fabricated the entire thing. It’s hard for many people to imagine that somebody could do this. But, well, they do. They do.

False memoirs have long been a common tool of propaganda. An important foundation of anti-Hitler propaganda, quoted over and over during the war, was Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler, which was also published under other titles, which was discredited by a Swiss researcher named Wolfgang Haenel in 1983.

It was this false record of alleged conversations with Adolf Hitler that laid the foundation for Allied propaganda, portraying the German leader as a psychopath bent on world conquest. In particular, you’ll see Rauschning very heavily quoted in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight propaganda films that were made for the War Department. But it also turns up quite a lot in respectable academic histories. J. F. C. Fuller even quotes Rauschning. John Toland quoted Rauschning in his overall rather sympathetic biography of Adolf Hitler. Yet he’s quoting Rauschning, because Rauschning had not yet been debunked when Toland was writing in the 1970s.

Rauschning’s was clearly the most important false memoir used in propaganda during the war, but Holocaust memoirs of course came later. One of the first fake memoirs about what is now called “the Holocaust” was Yankel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka, published as war propaganda by a Jewish organization in 1944. Wiernik’s pseudo-memoir claims, among other fantasies, that a naked Jewish woman wrested a rifle away from a guard and leapt over a three-meter fence. That’s a three-meter fence, which would be a world record even today. Wiernik also claimed that Ukrainian guards in Treblinka would frequently snatch children and murder them in front of their mothers, either tearing them in half with their bare hands, which is certainly much more easily said than done, or tossing them still alive into a fire, or swinging them by their legs to dash their brains against a hard surface. All of this, of course, contradicts the premise that the Jews were being tricked into going to their deaths in a gas chamber disguised as a shower.

The accusation of swinging a baby by its legs to dash its brains, by the way, is very ancient. It duplicates the way that Odysseus is supposed to have dashed the brains of Hector’s infant son Astyanax at the end of the Trojan War, in one of the poems of the Homeric Cycle. With so many credulity-destroying elements, this blatantly false memoir A Year in Treblinka was nonetheless used as a source by such eminent scholars as Raul Hilberg and Yitzak Arad.

Once government and Jewish organizations had established this line of propaganda, individuals began spontaneously making their own contributions. Private individuals will make up stories about themselves that conform to the prevailing myth, whatever it may be. The motive may be just to attract attention, or to make money, or, of course, to add to the overall campaign of propaganda. Also, when some accused person seems guilty, but the evidence of guilt is inconclusive, it can always happen that some false witness will come forth to fill the gap. That person thereby makes himself important, and can rationalize in his mind that he is aiding justice by lying.

One of the clearest examples of this kind of “righteous perjury” was in the case of the Polish immigrant and factory worker Frank Walus:

“A former nurse today testified that she saw Frank Walus take a group of children into a building to be executed during World War II. Sarah Leiter told her story during the fifth day of Walus’s trial on charges of having concealed membership in the Nazi Gestapo in order to obtain American citizenship.

Leiter testified that she saw Walus, wearing a uniform with a death’s head insignia, take 10 or 15 children into a building. Then, in her words, their screams reached heaven, and they finished them off. She said there was gunfire, and she never saw the children again.

When asked to identify the man involved in that, Leiter walked to the defense table, raised her arm, and said, ‘Here is the murderer.’ She was pointing at Frank Walus.”

Wow, a former nurse, and she seemed so sure of herself. “Here is the murderer!” That’s WBBM-TV in April 1978. By November 1980, however, everything looked very different.

“As we reported a few nights ago, the Justice Department had decided to withdraw its charges against Frank Walus, the southwest side man who had been accused of being a Nazi war criminal. Wednesday, that decision was made official. Larry Roderick reports:

‘He was happy. He was bitter. But Frank Walus was still an American citizen, and charges that he was a Nazi war criminal had been dropped. It had taken four years out of his life, but Walus finally proved he was on forced-labor farms during the war.’

‘Why did the government not identify the 12 Jewish witnesses?’”

Walus points out that the government had not bothered to verify the identities of the Jewish witnesses.

“‘I checked it out through the Polish government. I sent a list of anyone, and 12 witnesses. So just only three were born in Poland, and three were living in Poland. And nine never were born and never were living in Poland. So, how come they came over and testified, and point me out that, yeah, he killed my brother, he killed my sister. I saw him killing people.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan Wednesday afternoon read a carefully worded statement in court. The government, he said, had not proven Walus to be a Nazi. Indeed, the evidence showed otherwise, and the government urged that charges be dropped.”

That’s WGN News, the 27th of November 1980. Frank Walus explained that out of 12 Jews who testified against him in that trial, nine of them had never even set foot in Poland where these crimes are supposed to have occurred. That’s a lot of proven lying right there.

The Daily Mail on the 21st of June 2013, carried an essay by novelist and sometime historian Guy Walters that scratched the surface of this phenomenon. The title asked, “Could there be anything more twisted than these Holocaust fantasists?” I was very surprised to see this in the Daily Mail. It says that, “more and more people are making up memoirs about witnessing Nazi crimes.”

Walters names the following as fake memoirs: Towards the Dawn by Joe Corey, published in 2001. Corey claims to be a former member of a “special service unit” during the Second World War.

Walters points out that Corey’s claim to have discovered an “experimental extermination camp in Holland” is impossible. Next title: Fragments: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood by Benjamin Wilkomirski, published in 1995. Guy Walters says that this author was exposed as a liar in 1998, “by a Swiss journalist who revealed the author had been nowhere near the camps, that he was in fact called Bruno Grosjean and had been raised in an orphanage.” This book, by the way, had won the National Jewish Book Award in the USA and the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France before Daniel Ganzfried exposed it as a fraud. Daniel Ganzfried, I guess that’s a Jewish guy.

Angel at the Fence is another fraudulent book by Herman Rosenblatt, and it was published in 2008. Rosenblatt had gained notoriety through an appearance on Oprah in 1996. After the book was published, former inmates of the camp where the story was alleged to have taken place said that it was impossible, and within months Penguin withdrew the book from publication.

Next: Mischa, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years by Mischa de Fonseca, published in 1997. This woman claimed to have survived the Warsaw Ghetto and to have been raised by wolves. She explained:

“It’s not the true reality, but it is my reality.”

And now we have The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz by Dennis Avey published in 2011. Guy Walters himself takes credit for exposing this one as a fraud. Another book, Survivor of the Long March: Five Years as a POW, 1940-1945 by Charles Waite, published in 2012. This author claims to have witnessed a Jewish baby being snatched and killed by a guard in front of its mother. Walters notes that such episodes have become a staple of Holocaust literature. He considers them to lack credibility “for the simple reason that killing babies in front of their parents is not the best way to pacify a train full of prisoners.” Walters also suggests that most guards probably did not want to kill babies. Yeah, of course. It’s absolutely absurd.

Another title, Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? by Horace Greasley, 2013. This author claims to have escaped from a German POW camp more than 200 times. Walters comments:

“Mysteriously, Greasley’s POW record held at the National Archives does not make one mention of these 200 escapes. Working camps for NCOs such as Greasley were not the tightly guarded places conjured up by our collective imagination, which is leaning on images from Cold Dips and The Great Escape. In fact, bunking out of one’s camp to fraternize with local girls was hardly unusual and certainly not escaping in the sense most of us understand it.”

One may infer that Greasley’s reference to his German POW camp as “Hell” is likewise an exercise in histrionics.

I do have, however, some criticisms of Guy Walters’s survey. While presenting information that by its very nature suggests that the Holocaust story in general ought to be questioned, Walters has not gone all the way. On the contrary, Walters has taken preventive measures against being called a Holocaust denier and against being called an anti-Semite. He has compromised his veracity in order to do these things.

In the first place, Guy Walters pretends that lying about the Holocaust is a relatively new phenomenon that only became common in the 1990s. Walters is either shockingly ignorant of the history of disputes in this field or he is putting us on. Yankel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka, which I mentioned at the beginning, was published in 1944.

Paul Rassinier, a Marxist who had been an inmate of Buchenwald and Dora, criticized the dishonesty of other former inmates with The Lie of Ulysses, a glance at the literature of concentration-camp inmates as early as 1950. And Rassinier continued to write such books into the 1960s. The observation that many people have lied about what they experienced during the Second World War dates from the war itself.

In his discussion of Joe Corey’s pseudo-memoir, Guy Walters refrains from stating a fact that casts the entire Holocaust story into doubt. Walters does not point out that the Holocaust story has changed drastically since 1945. Mainstream historians today do not claim that there was any extermination camp west of the current border between Poland and Germany. But the propaganda of 1945 claimed more extermination camps spread over a wider area. You will still encounter people who think that there were gassings at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, but these are people that haven’t gotten the memo. Joe Corey’s tale of the “experimental extermination camp” might have been treated as credible in 1945, but it is not consistent with the official story that is enshrined today.

Walters avoids mentioning that the Holocaust story has changed, even though the fact that Joe Corey’s fable is consistent with a version of the Holocaust that is no longer believed is an important reason for doubting it. Walters covers himself against accusations of anti-Semitism by quoting a Jew who also complains about the lying. That Jew is one Felix Weinberg.

Based on the briefest perusal of what is available of his book online, I can say that Felix Weinberg seems to be far from rigorously truthful. I noticed some obvious problems. Weinberg says:

“The fact that inmates disappeared exactly six months after their arrival and that the chimneys were spouting smoke conveyed an ominous message.”

Is it really true that inmates consistently disappeared six months after arriving at Auschwitz? It’s very easy to find accounts that contradict that claim. In any case, Weinberg’s assumption that anybody who disappeared had been gassed is nothing more than an assumption and a rumor. But it seems that Weinberg also fabricated aspects of his own story. Weinberg claims that the Germans made inmates waste their valuable labor in purely sadistic exercises like digging holes and refilling them and carrying bricks around in circles. For a highly educated nation at war, which was at the time suffering a severe shortage of labor, this is obvious poppycock.

The most obvious lie in Weinberg’s account, however, is his reference to crematorium stacks belching smoke. Modern crematoria, which is what they had in Auschwitz, they were built by Topf & Sons, do not belch smoke. They are very clean burning. What comes out of the stack is steam and carbon dioxide and that’s it. And, believe it or not, there are Allied reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and none of them show smoke. So, that’s a very obvious lie even though Holocaust fiction is full of crematorium stacks ominously belching dark smoke. It’s like a standard feature, but it’s ridiculous.

Weinberg’s warning against Holocaust liars seems to be a diversion. It’s analogous to a thief saying “Watch out for pickpockets!” as he dips his hand into your pocket. Walters does more than just quote Weinberg, however. He concludes his essay with:

“We should all share the repugnance felt by the late Professor Weinberg and read his book instead.”

Really? Guy Walters surely realizes that very few readers of his essay in the Daily Mail will bother to obtain Weinberg’s book. If they do and if they have learned from Walters’ essay to exercise some skepticism, they will realize that Weinberg is hardly better than those authors that Walters himself criticized, and they will realize that Guy Walters himself does not tell the whole truth. I suppose that Walters had to hide behind the apron of some Jew in order to get his essay published in mainstream media without suffering repercussions, such as have been experienced by David Irving. That would make it the last time he could get such exposure.

After all, if it is true that publishing false memoirs damages the credibility of the Holocaust story the key element in that damage is the exposition of the frauds, the exposure of the frauds, and Walters has contributed to that. I hope that Walters at least felt the urge to hold his nose, however, while endorsing Weinberg, using him as a shield.

I cannot know for certain what Walters’ real intention was, but it seems to me that despite his stated intention to save the Holocaust from critics, despite his commendation of some allegedly legitimate Holocaust memoir, the admission in a major news source that much of the writing about the Holocaust is false, something that the general public likely did not know, represented a net plus for historical truth. And I have, in my discussions online, actually linked Guy Walters’s little essay there many times to prove to people that they really should be skeptical about these kinds of claims. You should at least be skeptical.

Now I’m going to look in depth at a case that came to light just a few years ago. It’s interesting not only for the fact that this is somebody who told lies about supposedly having been in a Holocaust concentration camp, but also for what it reveals about how people reacted to this. That was what really interested me. Not so much the fact that somebody would tell such a lie, but how does he get away with it? How are people letting him get away with it? That to me is the important question.

Joseph Bernard Hirt

Joseph Bernard Hirt worked as a school psychologist and psychology-teacher in Chester County, Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1993. It was not long after this that Hirt took up a second career – as a “Holocaust survivor.” In this role Hirt achieved significant regional notoriety.

The early period of Hirt’s career as a Holocaust survivor is described in an adulatory newspaper-article from 2006. The article quotes a friend of Hirt’s, Chester County Court Judge John L. Hall, to the effect that Hirt had begun telling the story of his adventures at Auschwitz “about ten years ago” (roughly 1996).

People were willing to believe Hirt’s tale in spite of the fact that he had passed most of his life without ever mentioning that he had been in Auschwitz:

“’I have been silent so long because I questioned the manner of asking anyone to comprehend’ such torture and degradation, the 81-year-old Holocaust survivor said.

“As a result, many of Hirt’s confidants had no inkling of a past that included multiple arrests, brushes with death, and eight months in a concentration camp infamous for its atrocities.” (K.B. Shea, Philadelphia Enquirer, 17 August 2006)

Immediately, the retired psychologist found that as a Holocaust survivor he was able to have a powerful effect on people, for example on Judge Hall:

“’It was the most stunning conversation I’ve ever had with anyone,’ Hall said.” […]

‘People talk about turning the other cheek; he actually lives it,’ Hall said. ‘That’s a manner of living one’s life to be emulated.’” (K.B. Shea, Philadelphia Enquirer, 17 August 2006)

With the impression that Hirt had made on Judge Hall, Hirt was able to get a part-time job with the court. (Hall was “delighted when Hirt agreed to join his office part time as a tipstaff, whose duties include ushering witnesses and jurors.”) In 2016, the teacher who invited Hirt to speak at Boyertown High gave Hirt $200 out of his own pocket, allegedly to help Hirt with moving expenses (David Mekeel, Reading Eagle, 9 June 2016).

With those instances of generosity appearing in the news, there must be many others that were not reported. Such are the benefits of surviving the Holocaust. If you are a Holocaust survivor, or if you can present yourself as a Holocaust survivor, according to the experience of Joseph Hirt, people will throw money at you and opportunities.

It seems to have been in 2001, however, that Hirt really became a professional Holocaust survivor:

“In 2001, he conducted a 10-week adult night school class about his experiences, which led to other speaking engagements….” (K.B. Shea, Philadelphia Enquirer, 17 August 2006)

Hirt’s activity as a lecturing Holocaust survivor has been not only lengthy but intense. Publicity for a presentation by Hirt several years ago states:

“Hirt frequently speaks to church groups, schools and other organizations throughout Lancaster County and surrounding areas.” (Jennifer Wentz, Lancaster Online, 27 January 2014)

It is reported that Hirt’s presentation over the past two decades continued to have as profound an effect on other audiences as it initially had on Judge Hall:

“[Frances] Smith [secretary of the Caernarvon Historical Society] and the historical society’s president, Yvonne Styer, decided to invite Hirt to Caernarvon after witnessing his emotional recounting of his experiences at an event in New Holland several months ago.

“’It’s very moving, and you will have nightmares,’ Smith said of Hirt’s presentation. ‘It’s hard to believe that anything like this happened.'”

Interesting phraseology there.

“Smith hopes that Hirt’s words will not only convince people that the atrocities of the Holocaust did happen, but also encourage them to make sure that they never happen again.” (Jennifer Wentz, Lancaster Online, 27 January 2014)

In August 2014, when he visited Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, Hirt’s story was reported on local television station WGAL. The self-aggrandizement and demand for pity are obvious in Hirt’s statements to WGAL:

“Surviving old age is easy for one Lancaster County man after what he’s been through in his life. The 89-year-old tells his story of survival to News 8’s Meredith Jorgensen.

‘Sometimes good news and sometimes bills.’

This is the scene each morning at the Town Hall restaurant in Blue Ball. Friends sharing stories.

‘That’s right.’

Then there’s this man.

‘Which in Polish means, I am Joseph.’

Joseph Hirt is an 89-year-old former psychologist, but he says he’s meant to serve another purpose.

‘You know, I think of myself as history on two legs.’

Joseph saw Adolf Hitler in person at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin when Jesse Owens won on the track. Five years later, he found himself in one of Hitler’s most notorious concentration camps, Auschwitz.

‘Our conversation topics were, what do you think is the best and easiest way to die, to be killed?’

Befriended by a doctor in the camp, he was given a charge.

‘You have to live. I order you to live so that you can tell the story.’

Eight months dragged by, and then his friend was dead.

‘He was killed, and I decided either it was going to be killed by Nazi or I was going to escape. It was 1942.

‘March 31st, my father’s birthday. Snow was still on the ground.’

He found a hole under an electrified fence.

‘I have nightmares. I still do. I keep running. I keep escaping.’

He’s decided sharing his story is his mission.

‘These people share my burden, you know, and so it becomes lighter. And I’m very grateful for that.’

In Lancaster County, Meredith Jorgensen, News 8.”

“Joseph is hoping to write a book about his escape from Auschwitz.” (WGAL-TV, 22 August 2014 )

“I am so traumatized, but these goyim are sharing my burden, and I am so grateful to these goyim for sharing my burden. Thank you, goyim.” Now, Joseph Hirt is described as an ex-psychologist, but I think he was still making full use of his psychological insights, because he had set up a psychological reward system for these goyim. “I’m so grateful!” And they’re in awe and they’re grateful for the chance to make him grateful. And the next thing you know, they’re giving him money, which indeed did happen.

The self-aggrandizement and demand for pity are obvious in Hirt’s statements to WGAL. “I have nightmares. I still do. I keep running. I keep escaping.” And I just want to point out here, this claim of having been permanently traumatized is an important part of Hirt’s act.

Hirt told WGAL that a physician in the camp had ordered him to live so that he could tell the story of what had happened in the camp.

Thus for twenty years, in eastern Pennsylvania and New York State, retired school psychologist Joseph Hirt has been a highly active and effective dysangelist. You’ve heard of evangelists, the bringers of the good news? Well, Joseph Hirt was a dysangelist, perpetuating and strengthening belief in the bad news of the Jewish Holocaust among what were, to a great extent, Christian audiences.

Hirt was even able to persuade his victims to pay him for inflicting nightmares upon them and distorting their outlook on life. The payment for one of Hirt’s appearances at a school was reported as $250. (David Mekeel, Reading Eagle, 9 June 2016)

On 15 April 2016 at 7 PM Hirt was to give a presentation at Lowville Academy & Central School in Lowville, Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Adirondack Mennonite Heritage Association. Bernardine Schwarzentruber, president of the Mennonite group, had heard about Hirt from her sister, who had witnessed a heavily attended presentation at a church 1½ years earlier.

Mrs. Schwartzentruber opined that the Mennonite group was “privileged” to hear Hirt speak. The Mennonite group was privileged, not only to hear Hirt’s story, but also because of the crowd that he would draw and, apparently, the donations that would follow. “Free will offerings” would be accepted “to cover expenses, with any extra money going to the association.” This was above and beyond a $1000 grant from a nonprofit foundation that presumably covered Hirt’s fee (and that of another speaker, John Ruth, who actually speaks about Mennonite history).

Hirt’s Claims

In 2015 Hirt addressed the Rotary Club of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Rotary Roundup of 2 March 2015 summarized Hirt’s presentation:

“Dr. Joseph Hirt, 89, of Adamstown, Lancaster County was born in Poland…. As a teenager, while he and his family were foraging for food during World War II in Belgrade, Hirt was kidnapped during a round-up and became a prisoner at the German Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. He arrived in Auschwitz in 1941. He escaped Auschwitz after eight months by crawling under an electric fence. He was recaptured but, he said, ‘I was allowed to live by one of the Nazis.’ Hirt came face to face with the so-called Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, while at Auschwitz. Years before his capture, he had attended the Olympics in 1936 in Berlin with his father where he saw Adolf Hitler refuse to shake hands with American Olympian Jesse Owens. ‘The thing is that made me a witness to history. I was there. I saw it,’ Hirt said.” (Rotary Roundup, 2 March 2015)

Essentially the same story was told in a press-release posted on Mars Hill Network (and with redactions in the Watertown Daily Times) to promote Hirt’s 2016 appearance before the Mennonites in Lowville. It states that Hirt “became a prisoner at the most notorious concentration camp in Auschwitz.” Fear not, however! This is an inspirational story for Christians, because: “His faith in God gave him strength to survive each day.”

“The atrocities he witnessed and experienced at the camp are forever in his memory. He shares his story at the age of over 90 years so that the listeners will never forget the Holocaust. He is writing his life story and expects to have the book available for sale at the April 15 event.” (Mars Hill Network)(S. Virkler, Watertown Daily Times, 9 April 2016)

As it turned out, Hirt’s book, which, putatively, he has been writing for at least ten years, was not yet ready in time for the event in Lowville. It may be that the purpose of claiming to be writing a book all this time was to increase Hirt’s semblance of importance. It turns out, however, according to the president of the Adirondack Mennonite Heritage Association, that Hirt has been taking advance orders for this book (B. Schwartzentruber, Journal & Republican , 30 June 2016). Has he been taking advance orders on this book for ten years?

Creeping Doubts about Hirt’s Story

Now we’re going to look at people who had some doubts about Hirt’s story but, for some reason, went along with it anyway.

On 19 April 2016, Hirt gave a presentation at a local high school that was reported in the Reading Eagle. According to this report, Hirt presented himself as a saint of a man, insofar as he was not vengeful toward the Germans who treated him so badly. (Be thankful for such mercy, you Germans!) He cannot, however, forgive:

“By forgiving, you forget, and that’s something I will not do.”

The climax of Hirt’s story, the escape from Auschwitz was reported as follows:

“Hirt escaped Auschwitz at age 17 after enduring eight months of near starvation. A guard dog dug a hole under an electric fence, so Hirt took his chance. He got past the fence, but was caught by a soldier guarding the perimeter. […]

“’The soldier caught me. He said he was going to take me to the wall to shoot me.’

“Hirt … struck up a conversation with the soldier in German. He asked where the soldier was from and if he had a family. The soldier did, and he had a son about Hirt’s age.

“’I asked him how he would feel if he knew his son was being taken to be shot as I was,’ Hirt said. ‘He was surprised. It had never occurred to him. I was just a human being.’

“Hirt ran as far and fast as he could until he came to a farm, where he hid for three months. (Gabbie O’Grady, Reading Eagle, 20 April 2016)

At least one student at that high school was perplexed at Hirt’s story of escape from Auschwitz, and was quoted in the newspaper:

“’I think it’s strange he was able to get past (the Nazi guard) how he did,’ said Boyertown senior Trey Yarnall.” (Ibid.)

The reporter’s decision to include this quote implies that she too doubted parts of Hirt’s story.

Even Phil Specht, the teacher of English and humanities who had invited Hirt to speak at Boyertown High, says that he disbelieved some details of Hirt’s story, but somehow was willing to overlook those problems and continued to assume that Hirt was fundamentally honest:

“Specht, who first saw Hirt speak at a church in Emmaus about two years ago, said Hirt’s talk was so good he simply had to get him to speak at Boyertown.

“Specht said he was a bit skeptical of some of the things Hirt claimed but didn’t really think that he could be a fraud.

“‘Some of the things he was saying were just out of this world impossible,’ Specht said. “But it was the same routine story every time I heard him speak.”

“Specht was especially skeptical of the photo Hirt said was of him at 70 pounds in the camp.

“‘I had a hard time believing that photo was him, but if it gives him comfort, then I let it go,’ Specht said.” (David Mekeel, Reading Eagle, 9 June 2016)

In retrospect, it seems that many who heard Hirt’s talks saw problems in his story, or even understood that some of what he said could not be true, yet somehow were inhibited from drawing the obvious conclusion that a story containing several impossibilities might simply be a false story, or, what is even more disturbing, felt that Hirt’s falsehoods must be indulged.

It is especially dismaying that teachers, who are responsible for the cultivation of clear thinking, and journalists, who are responsible for discovering and reporting accurate information, allowed Hirt to get away with this act year after year without criticism, even when they had clear indications that something was wrong. Moreover, one of Hirt’s first dupes was a judge.

Andrew Reid’s Skepticism

Finally, there was a man who could see that the emperor had no clothes, and was also willing to say it. Andrew R. Reid, a trained historian and history-teacher at South Lewis Middle School in Turin, New York, attended Hirt’s presentation in Lowville on 15 April 2016, and had encouraged his students to do the same. Reid recognized that several details of Hirt’s narrative could not be true – in particular Hirt’s use of what he claimed was a photograph of himself in Auschwitz, and the claim that he had met Jesse Owens in Lancaster, where Reid was born. Reid felt a professional duty not to let Hirt get away with it. The day after hearing Hirt speak, Reid began collecting information from various reputable sources, even from Hirt’s own nephew Michael, to prove that the most important parts of Joseph Hirt’s story were false.

In a letter dated 8 June 2016 and addressed “Dear Editor” – to the editors of the various news-media that had promoted Hirt – Reid summarizes the most important points of the case against Hirt:

“(1) Mr. Hirt was never at Auschwitz during World War II – the Auschwitz prisoner list is available online at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museim website and there is no record of a Joseph Hirt. The number he has tattooed on his arm – which he claims was his prison ID – is the real number of another prisoner from 1944. Camp records show only one escape in the months surrounding Mr. Hirt’s alleged date of escape, and that person was not Mr. Hirt.”

Note the fact there that Joseph Hirt had a fake Auschwitz tattoo number on his arm.

“(2) Mr. Hirt claims to have come ‘face-to-face’ with Dr. Josef Mengele while a prisoner at Auschwitz concentration camp before escaping 31 March 1942 – it is well documented that Mengele did not arrive at Auschwitz until May 1943.”

By the way, the obligatory presence of Dr. Mengele in every memoir of Auschwitz is impossible. The ubiquity of Dr. Mengele really just shows how much these writers copy each other, instead of writing what they really remember.

“(3) the picture of an emaciated man on a stretcher that he claims is him right before he escaped is, in fact, one that was taken by a soldier in the U.S. Army, Mickey Martin, a member of the 42^nd Infantry ‘Rainbow’ Division of the U.S. Army which liberated the Dachau concentration camp in 1945.”

Which means it’s really not even a Holocaust photo.

The points in Reid’s “Dear Editor” letter, which I just quoted, all relate to Hirt’s claims about Auschwitz, which are the element in Hirt’s story that had the greatest impact on his audiences. Reid says that audiences would gasp when he showed them the photo of a typhus-sufferer from Dachau, claiming that it was a picture of himself as “a skeleton with skin” having been deliberately starved in Auschwitz.

It was in a much longer letter, also dated 8 June 2016 but addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” that Reid went into detail about the points in the “Dear Editor” letter but also debunked several less important lies that Hirt had told.

Hirt’s story includes chance encounters with Adolf Hitler, Josef Mengele, and Jesse Owens, and that he not only met but developed a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Hirt claims that through Eleanor Roosevelt he was able to gain President Franklin Roosevelt’s intervention to allow his family to stay in the United States. Auschwitz of course, where Hirt claims to have been sent, is the most famous name in alleged extermination camps, and that would be the obvious reason why he claims to have been in Auschwitz.

Hirt had also been misrepresenting his religious affiliation, claiming despite Jewish ethnicity that he had been raised Christian (most likely to elicit greater credulity and sympathy from Christian audiences).

And I mentioned recently in my last program that this is not the only instance of lying in order to get Christians to be interested in this Holocaust narrative, because in 2017, Yehuda Bauer told an interviewer for the Jewish Telegraph Agency that the whole claim of 5 million non-Jews supposedly killed in the Holocaust was a lie invented by Simon Wiesenthal in order to get Christians interested in the Jewish Holocaust narrative. So, Joseph Hirt is not new in lying in order to get Christians interested in the story.

Reid determines that all of this is false. (It is entirely possible that Hirt met Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in September 1944, but President Roosevelt had died in April, so that Hirt’s story of the favor that she did for him is impossible.) There is no need to go into great detail about Reid’s proofs, since Hirt has now admitted that all of his claims relating to Auschwitz were false (his other lies being of less importance).

Hirt Resists

Hirt, however, initially resisted. Following Reid’s revelations on 8 June the Reading Eagle contacted Hirt for his reaction:

“Reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Hirt, after first denying any knowledge of the questions surrounding his story, lashed out at Reid. ‘You tell him to get a life and leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I don’t care for his questions. I’m sick and I’m tired and I’m old and I don’t need this crap.’ Hirt then hung up the phone.

“Reached a second time Wednesday night, Hirt said Reid’s claims against him are untrue. ‘There’s nothing to defend,’ he said. ‘I was there, and I don’t need to defend it. This is like being forced to defend being raped.’

“Hirt’s nephew, Michael Hirt, who lives in Illinois, said that much of what his uncle has been sharing about his life isn’t true. ‘His story is essentially correct until the part where he talks about being kidnapped and being taken to Auschwitz,’ Michael Hirt said in a phone interview Wednesday. ‘That’s where the storytelling begins.'” (D. Mekeel, Reading Eagle, 9 June 2016)

Joseph Hirt’s initial response was to express outrage and to try to bluff his way out of the situation. Perhaps he would have succeeded if his own nephew had not spoken against him.

Hirt’s Reluctant Retreat

In a letter dated 6 June 2016, which (according to a response from Reid to my inquiry) Hirt did not receive until 9 June, Reid appealed to Hirt for a “public repentant response in the near future.” In the absence of such repentance, said Reid, he would petition the district attorneys of Lewis and Lancaster counties to investigate Hirt for “fraud, identity theft, and forgery.”

On 24 June 2016, two weeks after the controversy became public, Joseph Hirt issued a kind of apology that was published by Lancaster Online.

Within the text of that epistle, before Hirt apologizes for anything, he offers six paragraphs summarizing mainstream holocaustography and asserting the importance of remembering the Holocaust. Such a dull and lengthy preface, without any indication at the beginning of what the real point will be, reflects Hirt’s reluctance to confess his dishonesty, and is most likely a deliberate tactic for making sure that many readers will lose interest before seeing the actual confession. In any case Hirt wants everyone to know that the Holocaust itself is not a lie, even though he lied to perpetuate it.

When Hirt finally does get to the point, it is an equivocal apology loaded with self-justification. The self-justification consists mainly in Hirt’s insistence that his lying was motivated by idealism. Sacred Truth needed Joseph Hirt’s help, in the form of lying! Of course, Hirt’s intentions were good:

“Both young listeners and adults responded to my presentations with feeling and often with a desire to share in the task of never forgetting and bearing witness. It wasn’t about me. I was wrong in using an untruth (my presence) in an attempt to enhance the important truth of the suffering and death of so many…. I used poor judgment and faulty reasoning, risking a sullying of the truth I was trying to share.”

Thus, Hirt maintains that he was not doing actual harm by lying to his audiences; it was a holy lie. Regardless of the money that he made from posing as a formerly starved Auschwitz survivor, it wasn’t about him. According to Hirt’s logic, the harm in his well-intentioned ruse was strictly potential, in the risk of being found out.

Another way to look at it is that if Hirt’s fraud hadn’t been discovered, it would have been all for the good! If by chance one is sympathetic to Hirt, one might be inclined to say that Reid is a reckless meddler for exposing such a beneficent deception. He should have kept his mouth shut!

A more cynical way to state the matter, putting aside the pretense that Hirt was doing good or intended to do good, is that Hirt is sorry only that he was caught.

Reid had asked for repentance but there is no real repentance here at all. A good indication of the lack of repentance is that Hirt continues to lie. This is clear.

Hirt declares in his apology:

“I am seeking help from my pastor. He knows my heart and my intent…. I ask your prayers and support…. Again I ask your forgiveness.”

But according to the information published by Andrew Reid, Hirt is “of the Bahai faith.” The Bahai have no clergy! Pastor is a term associated especially with Protestant Christianity. This is Joseph Hirt continuing to pander for sympathy and indulgence from Christians.

Another class of lie in Hirt’s apology are his attempts to retain some spurious residual status as a Holocaust survivor. Since his claim of having been at Auschwitz is debunked, he must now rely on other episodes that Reid did not address. Whereas Hirt had been claiming trauma from his experiences at Auschwitz, he now claims trauma from experiences in Yugoslavia and Italy:

“My family and I had spent the war years in hiding. We had suffered extreme trauma physically and psychologically, in cramped quarters, in constant fear of discovery or outright betrayal….”

Hirt is trying to maintain that he suffered horrendously during the war even though what is left of his story no longer supports it. By Hirt’s own account – as it now stands – the family, after 1½ years in Yugoslavia prior to that country’s involvement in conflict, then spent most of the period from 1941 to 1945 in one refugee-camp after another – first in Fascist Italy, then in Allied-occupied Italy, then in the United States – which is certainly not an ideal life, but preferable to experiencing an Allied area-bombing, or fighting on the Eastern Front, or being caught in the advance of the Red Army. There are abundant stories from the Second World War much more horrible than what is left of Joseph Hirt’s story. He does not claim that any member of his immediate family died during the war.

He does however still tell two dubious tales of unpleasant interactions with Germans, both of which carry the odor of stale, old war-propaganda.

Hirt says that the Italian Fascist government allowed his family into Italy as refugees from Yugoslavia in 1941 (after they were caught trying to enter the country fraudulently by pretending to be Italian citizens), and sent them to a refugee-camp at Rapino. After the collapse of Italy’s Fascist government in 1943, the guards deserted the camp, and Hirt’s family hired a guide to take them to the Americans:

“… who, as it turned out had accepted money from the enemy, too. We found ourselves led directly into the hands of an enemy snow patrol, invisible in their white gear until they rose from the snow around us. Father was thrown to the ground. His fingers were broken when his outspread hands were trampled by uniformed boots.”

Hirt does not explain by what miracle his family escaped this predicament. Also, the claim that an entire patrol lay waiting in the snow to ambush one little Jewish family seems absurd. This is too much drama. The story implies that Hirt’s family was highly important when it was not.

Another ridiculous story that Hirt still tells is about an encounter with a haughty and sadistic SS-officer:

“I was on the street (in Belgrade) returning with food for the family when an SS officer stopped me and asked my name. I stood at attention, looked straight into his face, and made eye-contact. At this point he hauled off and struck me in the nose and chin with his clenched fist. I ended up on the ground, bleeding from my nose and mouth as he screamed at me, ‘How dare you, you Untermensch, look at me, a member of the master race. You look at the ground. Show humility. Be humble.’ As I lay on the ground bleeding, he kicked me in the ribs as he walked away.”

Of course Hirt claims to have been permanently traumatized by this alleged incident.

Such a portrayal of pointless, hubristic brutality is like a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie. The story is extremely unlikely, for various reasons relating to the differences between Hollywood and reality.

For one thing, German personnel who physically harmed civilians without specific justification or orders were subject to punishment. Thus, the essence of the story is likely false on its face. But details of this episode (like the details of Hirt’s Auschwitz-episode) also should raise red flags.

Contrary to widespread belief in the United States, Germans during the period of Hitler’s rule did not habitually refer to themselves as members of “the master race.” The accusation that Germans in general regarded themselves as the master-race had been made during the First World War, and even at that time it was essentially false.

The term master-race had been used in English (e.g. John H. van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, New York, 1868, p. 38 ) long before the propaganda of the First World War accused the Germans of regarding themselves as “the master-race” fit to rule over Anglo-Saxons (as represented e.g. by the New York Times Current History of the War, 1915, p. 118).

Noteworthy in this kind of propaganda were quotes from Karl Felix Wolff, a self-taught Austrian folklorist and poet who wrote for Alldeutsche Blätter and Mannus, and, because of his eccentric views, was usefully quoted in the Entente’s anti-German propaganda. To impart greater importance to Wolff’s statements, he was sometimes identified as a “Pan-German leader” (Theosophical Quarterly, April 1917, p. 301), or called “Dr.” Wolff (Anton Nystrom, Before, During, and After 1914, New York, 1916, pp. 47-48), when in reality he was merely a writer without academic credentials.

The term master-race (Herrenrasse), while it had been used by a fringe-figure during the First World War, seems not to have been used in German National-Socialist literature at all. The word does not appear in Mein Kampf, nor in Rosenberg’s Mythus, nor in any German National-Socialist material that I have seen.

Herrenvolk appears several times in Mein Kampf, but this word is not properly translated as “master-race” (although such invidious mistranslation is commonplace). Herrenvolk is a general term referring to any people that happens to rule over another people, like the Normans in Mediaeval England, or, subsequently, the British in their empire. A German publication from 1933 states: “The Romans were undoubtedly the most important hegemonic people (Herrenvolk) of world-history” (Monatsschrift für das Deutsche Geistesleben, 1933, p. 317). Herrenvolk thus denotes imperial achievement rather than racial quality.

Even this misunderstood word Herrenvolk was not, however, an important element of National-Socialist propaganda. Ferdinand Hermens, an associate professor of economics at Notre Dame University who was familiar with the situation in Germany, attempted to correct this misconception:

“The point, of course, is that the German press and radio do not talk eternally about Germans as the Herrenvolk.” (F. Hermens, The Tyrants’ War and the People’s Peace, U. Chicago Press 1944, p. 235)

The belief that Germans during the period of Hitler’s rule habitually spoke of themselves as the master-race was due to the residual influence of Anglo-American propaganda of the First World War, which the Anglo-American propaganda of the Second World War largely copied. The gap between propaganda and reality here is such that it is extremely unlikely that Joseph Hirt encountered any SS-officer who referred to himself as “a member of the master-race,” although it is understandable why Hirt would invent such a story if he is still, as formerly in the case of Auschwitz, inserting himself into scenarios about which he has read.

Overcoming the Fear of Questioning

In the first sentence of his “conclusion” about Joseph Hirt, Andrew Reid states:

“The fact that no one has challenged Mr. Hirt’s extraordinary claims is not surprising – who would suspect someone of making such extraordinary claims about such a topic?” (A. Reid, long letter of 8 June 2016)

Anyone even slightly familiar with Holocaust Revisionism would not be saying this. False witnesses abound, and have been exposed as liars since the days of Paul Rassinier. The defenders of the Holocaust faith know it. The general public however has not had this fact impressed upon its consciousness, which is an important reason why Joseph Hirt was able to perpetrate his deception for so long without being challenged.

Reid, who affirms that he is “not a Holocaust Denier,” says that he was emboldened upon seeing an article from a few years ago by British historian Guy Walters (also “not a Holocaust Denier”) that lists seven famous Holocaust memoirs as frauds (Daily Mail, 21 June 2013). With this precedent Reid’s inhibition against challenging Holocaust frauds was reduced. Now Reid’s own well publicized exposure of Joseph Hirt’s deception carries the long overdue normalization of Holocaust-skepticism one more step forward.