Image claims to show George Soros in Nazi SS Uniform – Fact Check

Images are circulating online that claim to show a young George Soros in a Nazi SS uniform. Spin-off rumours also claim that Soros was a “Nazi collaborator” and that he would “hunt” Jews and turn them in.

FALSE

Images, including the one below, depict a young spectacled man adorned in a SS (Schutzstaffel) uniform along with the caption that the man is George Soros.

This is George Soros
Remember this the next time the Soros-funded liberals call you a racist, fascist, or Nazi

I give you George Soros. A SS in the National Socialist German workers party. Nazi party. He served under Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He said it was the best time of his life. The destruction and agony around him was euphoric to him. This man was making policy with Hillary Clinton. And some of you think Trump is dangerous. Wow!

However the photo doesn’t show a young George Soros. Soros was born in 1930, and as such would have only been 9 years old when World War II broke out, and would have been only 14 when Germany surrendered in May 1945. The man depicted in the photo is clearly older than this. Even if Soros had sought to join the SS at such a young age, he would not have been able to since it had a minimum age requirement of 17.

A simple reverse image search reveals that the man in the photo is called Oskar Groning, an SS soldier who worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp who was later charged in 2014 as an accessory to mass murder but who died before he could begin his sentence. There is no connection between Groning and George Soros.

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Soros is a frequent target for conspiracy theorists, and even more rumours have circulated social media that claim he was “Nazi collaborator” and had worked with the Nazis to identify and round up Jewish people and confiscate their property in Hungary. These claims are very misleading. As we have previously highlighted above, Soros was only 14 years old when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary, a fact frequently and conveniently omitted by those peddling this assertion.

The sole evidence that he had collaborated with the Nazis during the war tends to derive from a now infamous 1998 “60 Minutes” interview where Soros gave contradictory statements, initially claiming that – while pretending to be a Christian in order to avoid being captured by the Nazis – he helped in the confiscation of Jewish property, only to later claim he was a mere spectator.

Kroft: “My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.”
Soros: “Yes, that’s right. Yes.”
Kroft: “I mean, that’s — that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?”
Soros: “Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t … you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no — no problem at all.”
Kroft: “No feeling of guilt?”
Soros: “No.”
Kroft: “For example, that, ‘I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.’ None of that?”
Soros: “Well, of course, … I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would — would — would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the — whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the — I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.“

Either way, given that, as we previously stated, Soros was only a child at the time – a child who was attempting to disguise himself as Christian – it would be a gross distortion to characterise Soros as a Nazi collaborator.