The strange case of the Nazi camp guard and the fake Holocaust survivor

Moshe Peter Loth, a witness in a war crimes trial, said in his petition that he’d been tattooed as a child in the Stutthof camp and later had the tattoo removed – but it turned out to be a lie, writes Darren Richman

Peter Loth incorrectly claimed to be a Holocaust survivor (AFP via Getty)

In November of last year, in a crowded Hamburg courtroom, Moshe Peter Loth performed a simple act that made headlines all over the globe. It was the seventh day of the trial of Bruno Dey, a former concentration camp guard accused of having aided and abetted in the murder of 5,230 people. Loth, a Florida resident who’d flown over for a trial expected to be one of the last of its kind, turned to the spectators and spoke to them as a man who’d joined the case as a co-plaintiff to testify as a Stutthof survivor. “Watch out everyone, I will forgive him now,” he said before embracing the man on trial. The thing about stories that seem too good to be true is that sometimes they are.

There is a reason the act struck a chord and the appeal of the gesture is clear since it suggests we, as humans, have a capacity for forgiveness however extreme the transgression. Ultimately the moment ended up highlighting an entirely different issue; the difficulties of establishing veracity in such cases.

This has been a hot button issue in recent times with The Devil Next Door on Netflix tackling the historic case of John Demjanjuk in a series built around survivor testimonies. The subject of the documentary may or may not have been Ivan the Terrible, a man so nicknamed as a result of his barbaric behaviour while serving as a concentration camp guard. Some of the trial footage includes testimony that ultimately turned out to be mistaken – but perhaps the passing of time and the emotional weight of enduring such inhumanity means inaccuracies are inevitable.