POSTS FALSELY CLAIM that billionaire philanthropist George Soros was a Nazi and that he “owns” members of congress, Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.

These claims are baseless.

“George Soros ex-Nazi billionaire has sworn to ‘destroy the USA’,” read scores of posts on Facebook, dating back to 2026.

They continue: “He OWNS Antifa, most members of congress, Black Lives Matter, and Acorn to name a few of his anti-American organisations”

The post features a photo of a man in a Nazi SS uniform, implied to be Soros during World War 2. 

The man in the picture is not Soros, but rather an accountant who worked at Auschwitz called Oskar Groening.

Claims that George Soros was a Nazi are widespread online despite being untrue and arguably impossible. One such post by an Irish Facebook page was shared more than 130 times since being posted on 14 September. 

Soros was born in 1939 into a non-religious Jewish family in Hungary, who used false papers to hide from persecution when the Nazis invaded the country in 1944. Soros was still too young to have joined either the army or the Nazi party by the end of the war in 1945.

There is no record of him holding Nazi sympathies in the years since, and his politics have largely been a reaction to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century. 

Claims of Soros being a Nazi are often accompanied by photos of Nazi soldiers said to show the young Soros. Claims of this type have been repeatedly debunked.

Other claims in the post are too vague to discern their precise meaning.

Is it unclear what is meant by the claim that Soros “owns” most members of congress. Soros has donated to the political action groups supporting the Democratic Party. They are believed to have already donated about €90 million to help Democrats in this year’s midterm elections.

While this likely gives him some influence within the party, it is hyperbole to say he owns any members of congress, let alone “most” of them; the Democrats are in the minority. 

Similarly, it doesn’t seem possible to own the decentralised anti-fascist movements commonly called Antifa.

These self-directed groups often have no centralised command, and many eschew hierarchical structures at all, having only in common the name Antifa, first coined by an anti-Nazi group in 1930s Germany. 

Soros’s foundation has given money to racial equality groups, some of which were at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement against police violence, but there is no evidence of control over the movement. 

Soros has also given money to the US branch of Acorn, a charity that ran community groups, though this has been defunct in the United States for more than a decade.

There is also an international Acorn network, which includes the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) in Ireland. However, this is an association of “democratic organisations that operate like a union for their members” — it is not clear how this could be owned by one person in a meaningful sense.

There is no evidence Soros wields control over either of these groups. 

Soros made his fortune managing hedge funds starting in the 1960s. He has long been a target of falsehoods and conspiracy theories online, largely stemming from his support of progressive causes. However, some ascribe much of the anger directed toward him to antisemitism.

The Open Society Foundation, which awards money for Soros, has recorded more than €21 billion in expenditure since its foundation in the 90s. 

In Ireland, his foundation has supported multiple universities, as well as groups such as the Sex Workers Alliance Ireland, the Abortion Rights Campaign and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

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