SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS filled with antisemitic posts are spreading false claims about historical figures online.

One such Facebook account, with many hundreds of posts alleging conspiracy theories, includes claims that Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diaries were forged, as well as saying World War Two leaders Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were part of a Jewish plot.

Other posts on the account include illustrations of people wearing the Star of David, a symbol of Judaism that was also incorporated into the flag of Israel, secretly pulling the levers of power, or turning people against each other.

While those allegorical images aren’t factcheckable, the historical claims are.

Yalta

“Left to right, seated,” begins the caption on a photo of the Yalta conference, a meeting of Allied leaders to discuss the postwar reorganization of Europe.

“Churchill, a.k.a. Jacobson; F. D. Roosevelt, a.k.a. Rosenfelt; Stalin, a.k.a. Dzhugashvili (son of a Jew)!!” the caption continues.

“The three Jews were responsible for or caused the deaths of millions of innocent human beings during and after WW2.”

This post was shared more than 147 times since being posted on 5 December.

Aside from the conspicuous absence of blame for the Axis powers (which had invaded many European countries, starting World War 2, and pre-emptively attacked US and Russia), the description of the three leaders as Jews is false.

Stalin was raised in an Orthodox Russian Christian household, and his birth was registered in a Christian church. Stalin had for a while, trained for the priesthood.

(Dzhugashvili, a Georgian surname, is the Russified version of his mother’s maiden name, not his father’s surname).

There is no evidence that Stalin or his parents were Jewish.

Stalin’s private utterances show that he was contemptuous of Jewish people, and a campaign targeting Jews (not the first of Stalin’s reign) was underway at the time of his death.

The name Rosenfelt was a term used to disparage US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, commonly called FDR, by antisemitic figures.

FDR’s surname actually comes from the Dutch “Rosenvelt” meaning “rose field.” FDR had told a journalist that he did not know about his ancestors in Holland or whether they had been Jewish before they immigrated to America in the 17th century.

In any case, FDR was a Christian, and so far as his family can be traced, there is no evidence they were Jewish.

Winston Churchill was the leader of allies during World War 2. Helpfully for our purposes, he was also an enthusiastic, if untrained, historian. He was also from an aristocratic family, meaning that we still have records of many of his ancestors.

They were not Jewish. It is unclear what the name “Jacobson” in the Facebook post was referring to, as that was not the surname of either his mother or any of his grandparents.

A Churchill quote?

A number of Churchill quotes are also featured on this account. In some cases, these are paraphrasing something he had actually said. In others, it is made up wholesale.

“Germany’s unforgivable crime before the second world war,” one supposed quote says, “was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world’s trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profit.”

This post garnered more than 2,100 reactions and was shared more than 700 times since it was posted on 27 November.

Various versions of this quote appear across the internet, often ascribed to Churchill, and often ending with the additional phrase “We butchered the wrong pig”. Generally, the quote is taken to mean that bankers waged war on Germany as they saw it as a threat to profits.

However, these quotes either don’t give any source, say something like “his memoirs”, or lead to the foreword of a 2001 reprint of a book. There does not appear to be any historical source for the quotation.

The quote, nor any of its variations, appear in “The Second World War”, a history of the conflict by Churchill, which includes a whole volume on the run-up and causes of the war.

The quote is widely considered to be a fake.

Anne Frank’s pen

Posts on the same Facebook account don’t just target leaders of the Allied nations. One post also took aim at one of the most famous accounts of the Nazi persecution, written by a Jewish child living under occupation.

“Anne Frank’s Diary was found to have portions written in ball-point pen, which wasn’t commercially available until after her death”, reads a caption over the image of the diary’s author.

Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at 15 years of age, weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

This post garnered more than 1,900 reactions and was shared more than 330 times since being posted on 27 November

This accusation that Frank’s diary was inauthentic appears to come from a German police report into the diary. Reports on this noted the inclusion of loose pages of notes inserted into the pages by a graphologist who was studying the original in 1959. These did indeed contain marks by a ballpoint pen that was not in use until the 1950s.

However, the actual diary entries were written in pen and fountain pen.

The German police have since said that their earlier findings had indicated that the diary pages were made with authentic writing paper and implements.

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