Holocaust Encyclopedia
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False Witnesses
A false witness is a person who falsely claims to have witnessed an event, when in fact he was not physically present at the time of the event. It is therefore irrelevant what such a person claims about the given event, as he cannot have any personal knowledge of it. This stands in contrast to a person who was at a given location to witness an alleged event, but who gives false testimony about the event — meaning that the event did not happen at all or not the way the person claims. Such a person is a ‘true witness,’ but one who has given false testimony.
In the context of the Holocaust, over the decades since the end of World War II, numerous persons have been exposed as false witnesses — people who were never at a given location at the time in question. These cases have become so frequent that the German-language section of Wikipedia dedicated a specific page to them, calling it Wilkomirski-Syndrome, after one of the most prominent cases. Cases that reached public notoriety have become more frequent since the 1990s.
However, to this day, it is very risky to scrutinize survivor
testimony and expose false witnesses, as many lobby groups — the Jewish lobby foremost of all — demand that anyone doubting survivor stories be ostracized, shunned, excluded from good society, and even prosecuted where possible. After all, some 20 countries in the world have made it illegal to question or refute the orthodox Holocaust narrative, yet proper source criticism necessarily requires questioning every aspect of what a witness claims — especially once a witness’s credibility has collapsed due to proven mistakes, exaggerations, distortions and falsehoods.
Here is a certainly incomplete list of acknowledged cases of false witnesses:
- Denis Avey
- Joe Corry
- Bruno Doessekker (A.K.A. Binjamin Wilkomirski)
- Martin Gray (A.K.A. Mieczyslaw Grajewski)
- Marie Sophie Hingst
- Joseph Hirt
- Bernard Holstein
- Magdolna Kaiser
- Rosemarie Koczy
- Jerzy Kosinski
- Enric Marco
- Alfred Mende (A.K.A. Isaac Lewinson)
- Karin Mylius
- Wolfgang Seibert
- Axel Spörl
- Otto Uthgenannt
- Irena Wachendorff
- Monique de Wael (A.K.A. Misha Defonesca)
- Donald Watt
- Laurel Rose Willson
(See each entry as well as Vice 2014a & b and, as long as it exists, de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkomirski-Syndrom)