George Soros was not a Nazi officer. This lie has been around for many years.

Claim

Rating

Explanation

George Soros is a billionaire investor & a hedge fund manager who has become a philanthropist of late, through his Open Society Foundations. Earlier in 2020, he had criticized Narendra Modi government regarding the Kashmir issue following the abrogation of Article 370. He stated that the nationalism is on the rise, rather than decline and India had seen the biggest setback in that regard. These comments were made at the World Economic Forum. Apart from Narendra Modi, he had made a scathing attack on Donald Trump, Viktor Orban of Hungary.

A few days ago, George Soros again made comments on PM Modi at the Munich Security Conference. He Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies. Their fate is intertwined. Adani is accused of stock manipulation and his stock collapsed like a house of cards. Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in Parliament. This will significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms. I may be naïve, but I expect a democratic revival in India.”

Following this, some sections of the right-wing are attacking George Soros for his comments on Narendra Modi and Gautam Adani, both of whom have been under pressure in the last few weeks due to the release of the BBC Documentary “India – The Modi Question” and the Hindenburg Research report. Some are claiming in social media that George Soros was a Nazi officer in the regime of Adolf Hitler.

What’s the truth?

Running a reverse image search, we found that the person in the picture is Oskar Groening. He was an accountant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and he was accused of assisting the death of 300,000 jews in the camp. He was convicted for his crimes in 2015. He died in 2018 at the age of 96.

George Soros was born in 1930 in Hungary. By the end of World War II in 1945, he would have been 15 years old. George Soros is a Jew and during the Nazi regime, his father changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros, to avoid being found out that they are Jewish.

So, it is quite clear that the person in the viral image is not George Soros but Oskar Groening. This misinformation has been going around at least from 2018. See here and here.

Young George Soros, a young Nazi Sympathizer who made his billions stealing from the Jews! pic.twitter.com/Unoib5K8tB

— ❌ ❌ Louie Suzara ❌ ❌ (@dsrtvet) July 10, 2018

 

This has been fact-checked by various organisations such as The Myth detector, Snopes, Factcheck.org etc over the years. But this misinformation is propped up every time in a different country when Soros makes a comment about a country.

Conclusion

In our search, we find that the claim that George Soros was a Nazi officer/soldier is untrue. The person in the picture is Oskar Groening.