Does a viral post of a man in a Nazi SS uniform document the young life of financier George Soros? No, that's not true: It's not Soros. Further, the meme and other similar posts about Soros provide no documentary evidence for the extraordinary claim that Soros, who was 14 at the time of the Nazi occupation of his home country, served in the SS. The man in the meme is Oskar Gröning, an SS corporal at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Gröning's life is extensively documented in interviews he recorded that do not contest the charge that he was part of the Auschwitz unit that killed 300,000 and the photo of him has been used without correction since before his death.
The mis-labelled photo was posted May 4, 2025 on X (archived here) by numerous accounts, including the @4roeser account under the title "This is George Soros". It opened:
Remember this the next time the Soros-funded liberals call you a racist, fascist, or Nazi.
The post looked like this on X at the time this fact check was written:
The man in the photo is Oskar Gröning, a corporal in Hitler's Waffen SS who died in 2018, according to obituaries in the New York Times (archived here) and other evidence-based news outlets.
Using GoogleNews, an index of thousands of evidence-based news sites and posts, Lead Stories found no credible reporting that Soros was an SS member. Instead, using the key phrase "Soros In The SS" turned up only fact-checks refuting the claim and not document-based reporting that supported the claim.
The photo, described as an item from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum collection, illustrated a 2015 article by the New York Times about Gröning's trial in a German court, which found him complicit in the murder of 300,000 people at Auschwitz:
(Source: NewYorkTimes.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
Lead Stories, seeking to re-corroborate the origins of the photo has requested confirmation from the European Court of Human Rights and from the museum at Auschwitz and will publish responses when we receive them.
Uncontested by any credible governmental or news organization is Soros' biography, (archived here) which says he was 14 at the time his home country, Hungary, was invaded by Hitler's army. Soros family, Jewish and under threat, obtained false identification papers to obscure their Jewish heritage and stayed in Hungary until after World War II's end.
Soros made his way to London by 1947, where he attended the London School of Economics and then to the United States, where he went on to found a billion-dollar hedge fund empire in finance. His support for liberal/progressive causes has made him a target of misinformation.
The European Court of Human Rights in 2017 rejected an appeal for leniency for Gröning, who was 94 at that time. He never contested prosecutors' claims that he had participated in mass murder. Lead Stories has asked for a link to any file holding a copy of the photo if it was placed in evidence in the case.
The court described Groning as follows in its summary of the case (archived here):
From September 1942 until October 1944 he served in the Auschwitz extermination camp, as a member of the unit which administered the victims' belongings. The applicant, who wore a uniform and carried a weapon, was mostly assigned to work at the "ramp" where, upon arrival by train, the deportees were "selected", that is, sent either to the concentration camp or to the gas chamber. The applicant was not directly involved in the selection process but, as a member of his unit, was responsible for collecting and securing all luggage and other belongings. Between 16 May 1944 and 11 July 1944 approximately 430,000 Hungarian Jews arrived and approximately 300,000 of them died in the gas chamber ...
Readers seeking more Lead Stories fact checks about Soros can find them here.
