Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the book The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
An ethnic Jew, Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 and survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary before moving to the U.K. in 1947. The Nazi occupation of Hungary began on March 19, 1944, forcing Soros into hiding until being liberated by the Russians on January 12, 1945.
In spring 1944, the Nazis ordered the creation of the Central Council of Hungarian Jews, which was tasked with communicating the wishes of the Nazis and local collaborating authorities to the Jewish community. The council included Jews who were aware of the Nazis’ atrocities but believed that they would be exempted from them. And they were exempted from persecution—initially.
Soros was part of the Council briefly before assuming his new identity. He recalled the experience in an interview with the New Yorker:
“This was a profoundly important experience for me. My father said, ‘You should go ahead and deliver [the summonses], but tell the people that if they report they will be deported.’ The reply from one man was ‘I am a law-abiding citizen. They can’t do anything to me.’ I told my father, and that was an occasion for a lecture that there are times when you have laws that are immoral, and if you obey them you perish.”
George’s father Tivadar recalled that after George’s second day on the job, he returned home with a summons, to which Tivadar asked if George knew what it meant. George replied, “I can guess. They’ll be interned.” Tivadar then told him the Jewish Council has no right to give people orders like that, recalling in his memoir Masquerade: The Incredible True Story of How George Soros’ Father Outsmarted the Gestapo:
“I tried to tell the people I called on not to obey” he [George] said, clearly disappointed that I wouldn’t let him work anymore. He was beginning to enjoy his career as a courier: it was all a big adventure.
Soros’s biographer echoed similar sentiments, noting that “George had liked the excitement of being a courier but he obeyed his father without complaint.” Soros would later cite this experience as a reason for disliking fellow Jews for being collaborators, while exempting himself.
During the Nazi occupation, Soros’s father Tivadar Soros obtained papers giving his immediate family Christian identities. He decided to split up the family so that if one of them were outed as Jewish, the rest of the family had a chance of surviving.
After the family was split up for their own safety, Soros went to live as Sandor Kiss with a man named Baumbach, as arranged by his father. Baumbach was a friend of Tivadar, an official at the Ministry of Agriculture, and a Nazi collaborator. Baumbach played the role of Soros’s godfather. Soros would never acknowledge the role that Baumbach played in likely saving his life, and he died anonymously in 1999. His identity was later revealed in 2018 as Miklós Prohászka.
The “godfather” had the job of taking inventory of possessions seized from Jewish families—trips that Soros accompanied him on. During an interview Soros gave with 60 Minutes, host Steve Kroft asked, “My understanding is that you went…went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Some fact-checkers have attempted to “debunk” the implications of this interview by stating that Soros merely tagged along instead of actively participated in persecution—but Soros has no remorse even for doing that.
“I mean, that’s—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?” Kroft asked.
“Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t…you don’t see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all,” Soros said emotionlessly.
“No feeling of guilt,” Kroft replied.
“No.”
When asked how he couldn’t sympathize with other Jews being persecuted, Soros sociopathically replied by noting the “humor” in how his behavior then is similar to his behavior in finance, and then employed the old “just following orders” defense.
“Well, of course…I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in the markets—that if I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
This lack of conscience would later prove lucrative in the worlds of politics and business.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate.
