Avey, Denis

Denis Avey (11 Jan. 1919 – 16 July 2015) was a British soldier who was incarcerated at a PoW camp near the Auschwitz-Monowitz labor camp. In his 2011 memoirs titled The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, he claimed to have swapped places with a Jewish Monowitz inmate, so he could experience how the Jews were treated in their camp. He claimed that he wanted to report about this after the war. However, instead of doing this, he waited for 65 years. The tales he told then consisted mainly of clichés about the Auschwitz Main Camp and Birkenau, cobbled together in an incoherent narrative. If Avey spent some time at the Monowitz Camp, he could not have had any knowledge of what was unfolding in those other camps. Furthermore, the Jew he claimed to have swapped places with survived the war and was interviewed in 1995. Although he confirmed that some British soldier had helped him out, he said nothing about having swapped places with him.

Holocaust skeptics blew the whistle on this fraud already in 2010, after Avey had given the BBC an interview in late 2009 (see Yeager 2010). A year later, investigative mainstream journalist Guy Walters exposed Avey’s fairy tale along similar lines (see Walters 2011). However, that stopped neither the BBC nor the British government from piling praise and accolades on Avey for his alleged heroic deed (see Yeager 2011).