{"id":5261,"date":"2013-02-11T03:57:22","date_gmt":"2013-02-11T09:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=5261"},"modified":"2013-02-11T03:57:22","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T09:57:22","slug":"new-doubts-cast-on-holocaust-account-of-nazi-child-mascot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/new-doubts-cast-on-holocaust-account-of-nazi-child-mascot\/","title":{"rendered":"New doubts cast on Holocaust account of Nazi child mascot"},"content":{"rendered":"

SYDNEY (JTA) — A war crimes investigator cast fresh doubts on the account of a purported Holocaust survivor who says he was a child mascot for Nazis. Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, wrote to officials last week at the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany contesting the miraculous survival story of Alex Kurzem, an elderly man who now lives in Melbourne.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything in this case appears to point to a scam, but only a comprehensive investigation can finally determine whether Kurzem is indeed a Holocaust survivor, which I very much doubt, or an impostor whose main motivation was to gain fortune and fame by distorting his unusual wartime experiences,\u201d Zuroff wrote.<\/p>\n

Zuroff\u2019s intervention came just after the Claims Conference, which approved reparations payments for Kurzem in 1999, handed over the case to its ombudsman, Shmuel Hollander.<\/p>\n

Hollander is now sifting through a dossier of claims, including those by two American investigators, Barry Resnick and Colleen Fitzpatrick, who have doubted Kurzem\u2019s story since seeing a feature on him on the CBS news magazine \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in 2009.<\/p>\n

Kurzem claims he witnessed his mother, brother and sister being massacred in 1941 in Koidanov, or Dzyarzhynsk, in Belarus before escaping and being adopted by a Latvian SS guard who gave him a new name (Uldis Kurzemnieks) and made him his battalion\u2019s mascot.<\/p>\n

The Americans do not dispute he was a child mascot, but they do contest his claim that he witnessed his family being murdered and that he was born a Jew.<\/p>\n

Kurzem, who has vehemently denied the allegations, told his story in a best-selling book and an award-winning film, both titled \u201cThe Mascot\u201d and written by his now deceased son, Mark.<\/p>\n

The Claims Conference, which recently was embroiled in a nearly $60 million fraud, said it was treating the investigation with the \u201cutmost of seriousness.<\/p>\n

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