Lying about Elie Wiesel

[Updated on 08.09.2019]

A whole cottage industry has sprung up in recent years devoted to "proving" that the late Elie Wiesel was a total fraud: an impostor who stole an actual Auschwitz survivor's identity. Most of the crazies are of course Holocaust deniers. One notable exception is an actual Jewish Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, Nikolaus Grüner, whose book Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713 serves as a springboard for the deniers.

To remind our readers: according to Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) in Auschwitz he had the number (and a corresponding tattoo) A-7713, his father Shlomo Wiesel had the number A-7712.

The basic denial claims look like this:

1. Elie Wiesel allegedly had no visible Auschwitz tattoo.

2. Camp documents allegedly show that Lazar Wiesel A-7713 from Auschwitz was born in 1913 (not 1928 as Elie Wiesel; note: both "Elie" and "Lazar" are variants of the name "Eliezer") and that A-7712, who Elie Wiesel said was his father Shlomo, was actually someone named Abram Viezel.

3. Grüner claimed that he knew the "actual" Lazar Wiesel A-7713 in Auschwitz (Monowitz) and Buchenwald and that he wasn't the same person as Elie Wiesel. Moreover, Grüner claimed to have also known the prisoner A-7712, Lazar's brother Abram.

The denier logic at its finest: the famous Buchenwald photo.

Deniers wouldn't be deniers if they had a modicum of common sense. Case in point, a guy who goes under the nickname "The Black Rabbit of Inlé".

Dumb Neo-Nazi Carolyn Yeager Attacks an Auschwitz Survivor, Beclowns Self.

In her articles Joshua Kaufman vs Reinhold Hanning – Insanity in a German courtroom, I want to see Joshua Kaufman’s Auschwitz tattoo – 109023, Further evidence that Joshua Kaufman is lying about being Auschwitz prisoner 109023 and Busted: Joshua Kaufman’s claimed Auschwitz number belongs to someone else the infamously dim neo-Nazi Carolyn Yeager proposes that Joshua Kaufman, an Auschwitz survivor, is lying about his Auschwitz number being 109023 because the number and Kaufman's chronology do not fit together and because someone else was registered in Auschwitz under the same number.

Carolyn Yeager: Two Clarifications

I wouldn't normally be interested in defending Yeager, whom we have written about in the past, but I have decided to share some research information that can clarify some debates about her that are occuring in far right circles. Firstly, Yeager's ex-husband Lawrence Theodore Kahant was not Jewish. His genealogy clearly traces to an male ancestor who was born in New York between 1835 and 1837, whose wife immigrated from England, and who worked as a confectioner. Secondly, Yeager-Kahant was charged with theft in 2009 but, as far as I can tell, her arrest record shows the case being dismissed. Yeager-Kahant was an art teacher prior to her retirement, although it seems she was nearly 60 when she qualified.

Yeager v. Neander 2: No Foot Left Unshot

Again, Dr. Neander may choose to reply to the deranged neo-Nazi lunatic Carolyn Yeager's new response to him at the antisemitic CODOH blog "Inconvenient History", though it is only understandable if he chooses not to give her more limelight. But again, here are my personal thoughts.

Response to C. Yeager

by Joachim Neander, PhD
Dear Mrs. Yeager, on January 24, 2010, you published, at the Revisionist blog Inconvenient History, a critical look on my analysis of Irene Weisberg Zisblatt’s memoir The Fifth Diamond,^[1] published here on the Holocaust Controversies blog on January 9, 2010.^[2] I feel your essay deserves a response, and I have chosen for it the form of an “open letter.”

Yeager vs. Neander

Dr. Neander will probably have something to say about this reaction to his Zisblatt critique by the neo-Nazi scum Carolyn Yeager when he returns from vacation. I will only note that Yeager shows her idiotic paranoid mindset once again:

However, probably for the reason that he seems to have been assigned this project by some well-known Holocaust defenders (Kenneth Waltzer, Chairman of the Jewish Studies Dept. at the University of Michigan, who provided him with the Seigelstein documents, for one)...

Let me assure you, Yeager, that Dr. Neander doesn't lie when he writes "independent scholar". He is not assigned to anything by anyone, and particularly not concerning this essay, and I say this as someone who knows the story behind it.

And Yeager, of course, is not a very attentive reader, to put it mildly:

In the first paragraph, Neander writes that she “had her first name changed to Irene” when she obtained a visa in 1947 for emigration to New York. That can be understood either as ‘someone else changed her first name’ or ‘she herself had it changed’ - leaving the interpretation up to the reader. In fact, she claims in her book (but not in her testimony) that her name was Chana (by which she called herself up to that point), and this name was changed, much to her surprise, by an immigration official because he (or someone) thought the “American” name of Irene would be better for her. Taking such prerogatives is and was simply not done by immigration officials, and adds to the farcical quality of the book.

And here's what Dr. Neander writes later in the essay:

The first thing we learn from the documents, by the way, is that Mrs. Zisblatt was "Irene" already at Auschwitz, that she did not receive this first name just on immigration, as she relates: "I panicked. ‘This is not my name ... Irene ... I have never heard of that name,' I cried" (TFD:103). It is, however, possible that she had "Chana" as an additional, Jewish, first name.

So Dr. Neander recounts enough of this episode for the reader to understand that she supposedly received this "new" name against her will. And that first mention Yeager cites was the initial short recounting of her story (Neuengamme and all) which Dr. Neander later deconstructs.

She writes:

The reason Neander gives for telling the truth about dishonest holocaust survivors is not a regard for truth itself, but is because students who today are gullible enough to believe it, might, when they grow up, “reach for a scholarly book” and, discovering they were lied to, reject the entire Holocaust story.

But here's what Dr. Neander wrote:

It is not sufficient to defend the historical truth about the Holocaust only against distortions from the deniers' side. Distortions from the side of exaggerators, mythmakers, and self-aggrandizers must equally be rejected. A matter as serious as the Holocaust demands serious, honest, and accurate treatment. Not least with regard to the dignity and the memory of those who perished.

She is also not very bright and doesn't even get dry sarcasm (cf. the "feces ingestion" episode).

Carolyn Yeager is a dumb neo-Nazi liar, pure and simple.

The rest I leave to Dr. Neander.

Update: here's his response.

Deniers Who Favour the Prosecution of Free Speech (Part 2)

In this radio interview, starting at 22 minutes, 19 seconds, Carolyn Yeager states:

The point I want to make is that I think the time has come that while...we have debunked so much...the only way to go forward is through the courts...The European people founded this country and we can't go into our own courts, because they have been taken over. We need to use our courts for ourselves.

At 35:28, she says:

If they attack us in the courts, I think we should be going after them in the courts based on they cannot back up what they say.

This advocate of using courts to prosecute free speech writes for the Inconvenient History blog, which claims be founded on...the protection of free speech.

Carolyn Yeager and the ANSWP

Further to Sergey's article, Yeager was a director of the American National Socialist Workers Party until 2007. Her resignation was discussed by Bill White here:

I am sorry to see Carolyn resign. She was very helpful with the magazine and a good activist.

This was the response of Yeager's organisation to the Virginia Tech shooting, the victims of which included Liviu Librescu.

CODOH's "Inconvenient History" blog - just another antisemitic outlet

From the "Purpose" page of the blog in question:

In discussing the controversial issues brought forth by historical revisionism, we will always strive to take the moral high ground. This means that we will abstain from ad hominem attacks and other forms of unfair argumentation. Rather than involving ourselves in polemics, we will calmly present our arguments and then let the facts speak for themselves.

From Carolyn Yeager's critique of Irene Zisblatt from that same blog, which the IC team is "proud to present":

Middle school, the two to three years between grade school and high school, is when Holocaust studies are most heavily force-fed to American school children because of laws passed in many state legislatures by craven politicians hungry for Jewish votes and money, or fearful of Jewish media power.

Who's Carolyn Yeager?