Billionaire and philanthropist George Soros is still not a Nazi, despite online claims

Philanthropist George Soros has long been maligned by false claims that he’s affiliated with the Nazi Party, and some have emerged anew as his name is misleadingly connected to pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses. 

A May 9 Instagram post’s caption, for example, says, "George Soros is a roaring, cold-blooded Nazi sociopath and one of the largest donors is funding the radical anti Israel college protests around the country."

The post attributed this quote to Soros about Nazi-occupied Europe: "It was actually probably the greatest year of my life, the year of German occupation, because you see incredible suffering around you." It also includes a video bearing the logo of Infowars, a website trafficking in conspiracy theories. 

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First, Soros is not a Nazi. He is a Hungarian Jew who fled fascism. When the Nazis invaded Hungary, his father obtained false identities for Soros and his brother, and Soros was sent to live with an agricultural official who passed him off as his Christian godson. 

"This is how Mr. Soros was able to survive the Nazi occupation," Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic organization Soros founded, previously told PolitiFact. "Mr. Soros was hiding from the Nazis in order to survive." 

We searched for the quote attributed to Soros in the post and found only other social media posts — no credible sources. But it appears to be a paraphrase of something Soros can be heard saying in the first of two clips in the Instagram post’s video.  

In the first clip, an audio recording, Soros says: "It was actually probably the happiest year of my life, that year of German occupation. For me, it was a very positive experience. It's a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you're 14 years old and you don't believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It's a very happy-making exhilarating experience."

This comes from a 2001 interview Soros did with journalist Charlie Rose, but it’s been edited to leave out some context. 

"It was also a very strange experience for me because it was actually probably the happiest year of my life — that year of German occupation — because for a 14-year-old kid to have an adventure — first of all, I had a father who understood what's going on," Soros said in the interview. "We were confronted by unspeakable evil. It's like a David-and-Goliath fight, and you are on the side of the angels. And you actually prevail by surviving. So, for me, it was a very positive experience. It's a strange thing, you know, because you see incredible suffering around you. And, in fact, you are in considerable danger yourself. But you're 14 years old, and you don't believe it, that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have belief in your father. It's a very happy-making, exhilarating experience."

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The post’s second clip is from a 1998 Soros interview with CBS’  "60 Minutes." In the clip, then- "60 Minutes" Correspondent Steve Kroft says, "While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews."

Kroft added, "You watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps." 

"Right," Soros said. "I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made."

Kroft goes on to say that Soros’ fake godfather "helped in the confiscation of property from Jews." Soros confirms this is true, but said it wasn’t a difficult experience for him. 

"Maybe as a child you don't — you don't see the connection," Soros said. 

He later clarified: "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 markets — that if I weren't there — of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else 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, I had no role in taking away that property. So, I had no sense of guilt.''

As a 2018 New York Times profile of Soros notes, the job of the agricultural official who cared for Soros included "taking inventory of a confiscated Jewish-owned property."

"He took George with him," the story said. "These episodes have become the basis for the claim that George was a Nazi collaborator. In fact, though, there is no credible evidence that he collaborated with or was sympathetic to Nazis."

In a 2011 essay in The New York Review of Books, Soros describes 1944 as a year in which his family "resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were — yet we prevailed. 

"Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others," Soros said. "This left a lasting mark on me, turning a disaster of unthinkable proportions into an exhilarating adventure. That gave me an appetite for taking risk, and under my father’s wise guidance I learned how to cope with it — exploring the limits of the possible but not going beyond them. I relish confronting harsh reality, and I am drawn to tackling seemingly insoluble problems."

We rate claims that Soros is a Nazi Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.