George Soros was not a Nazi SS officer

31 July 2019
What was claimed

A picture shows George Soros as an SS officer.

Our verdict

Incorrect. The picture is of Oskar Gröning, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, and not Mr Soros.

A post claiming to show a picture of financier George Soros as a Nazi has been shared hundreds of times on Facebook.

The picture is not of Mr Soros—who is Jewish, and was a teenager in Hungary when it came under Nazi occupation—but rather of Oskar Gröning, an SS guard known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”.

The misidentification has been made several times before, and it’s previously been debunked by various American news organisations.

Full disclosure: George Soros is the founder and chair of Open Society Foundations. Between 1st June 2017 to 30th November 2018 Full Fact received a grant from the Open Society Foundations. The grant was restricted to our automated fact checking work. We disclose all funding we receive over £5,000; you can see these figures here. Our funders have no input into our editorial content. 

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