Joseph Hirt said he fabricated story of being sent to camp and meeting Nazi doctor Josef Mengele to ‘keep memories alive’ about history of the Holocaust.
A Pennsylvania man who claimed for years to have escaped from Auschwitz, met track and field star Jesse Owens and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, confessed on Friday that he had fabricated the entire story.
“I am writing today to apologize publicly for harm caused to anyone because of my inserting myself into the descriptions of life in Auschwitz,” Joseph Hirt, 86, wrote in a letter sent to his local paper, LNP, this week. “I was not a prisoner there. I did not intend to lessen or overshadow the events which truly happened there by falsely claiming to have been personally involved.”
“I was wrong. I ask forgiveness,” he added. “I determined at that moment to do everything in my power to prevent the loss of the truth about wartime life (and death) at Auschwitz.”
He added an extraordinary prologue and epilogue to the story, saying that he saw Adolf Hitler turn his back on Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and that he met Eleanor Roosevelt and Owens after his arrival in the United States. lmao these lying kikes just cannot help themselves
“I want to be clear – I am not a Holocaust denier,” Reid wrote in his own letter, noting that he got his first job from a concentration camp survivor. “It is partly in his memory and for the preservation of the truth of what millions of people endured that I have taken upon myself the task of exposing Mr Hirt’s shameful deception.”
Hirt is not the first to fabricate or exaggerate a Holocaust story, worrying historians who fear these voices encourage people who deny the deaths of (((six million))) people. Herman Rosenblat, a Polish survivor, embellished his 1993 memoir and made up some parts entirely, including the love story at its heart. At the time, historian Ken Waltzer wrote in the New Republic that he was alarmed by how quickly people accepted the story.
“This was not Holocaust education but miseducation,” he said. “This shows something about the broad unwillingness in our culture to confront the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust. All the more important then to have real memoirs that tell of real experience in the camps.”
theguardian.com
