The Nazi Mascot

Via BBC News:
The secret history of the Nazi mascot

By Nick Bryant BBC News, Melbourne

Alex Kurzem came to Australia in 1949 carrying just a small brown briefcase, butweighed down by some harrowing psychological and emotional baggage.

Tucked away in his briefcase were the secrets of his past – fragments of his life that he kept hidden for decades.

In 1997, after raising a family in Melbourne with his Australian bride, he finally revealed himself. He told how, at the age of five, he had been adopted by the SS and became a Nazi mascot. His personal history, one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from World War II, was published recently in a book entitled The Mascot.

Amazon.com tells much more of the detail of how the book came to be published.

In newsreels, he was paraded as ‘the Reich’s youngest Nazi’ and he witnessed some unspeakable atrocities. But his SS masters never discovered the most essential detail about his life: their little Nazi mascot was Jewish.

“They didn’t know that I was a Jewish boy who had escaped a Nazi death squad. They thought I was a Russian orphan.”

Read the rest of the story.

 

maryt