(Author: Alon Shapira, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024)

 

Editor’s Note: In the Winter 2024 issue, JA published Alon Shapira’s in-depth exploration of a famed but often misrepresented act of heroism during World War II by South African POW Corporal Bernard Friedlander (“WHAT ON EARTH IS THERE TO TALK ABOUT?” – AN ACT OF WARTIME HEROISM FORGOTTEN, AND REMEMBERED – Jewish Affairs). In this latest article, the writer Mr. Shapira proceeds to recount the controversial story of one of the other POWs involved in the same incident, Denis Avey, around whose account of his subsequent experiences as a POW and acts of heroism on behalf of Holocaust victims many serious questions have come to be raised.

 

– “When you spend time with someone like Denis …. He’s such a special man; he’s done special things in his life. But you see how touched he is by the fact that people know what he did. And that’s because we as an organization made that happen.” [Karen Pollock, Chief Executive, Holocaust Education Trust, IWM interview 20 October 2010]

“He is a total fraud. I crossed paths with him at a dinner. I was asked to come, and I met him briefly. He waited until most of the people had died before he told this fabrication thinking he would get away with it….” [Kitty Hart Moxon, Honorary Patron, Holocaust Education Trust, 18 December 2015]

“Upholding the truth and integrity of the Holocaust is vital, and when new information comes to light it must be taken seriously.”  [HET, 1 May, 2022]

‘The Holocaust Educational Trust’s name will be removed from the e-Book and from further publications of the book. We consider the matter closed.’ [HET, 24 March 2022]

 

The first part of this article [see Vol. 79, #2, Winter 2024] focused on the British torpedo attack on an Italian ship Jason/Sebastiano Venier bearing about 2200 Allied POWs on 9 December 1941 and in particular the pivotal role played by a young South African NCO, Bernard Friedlander, in ensuring that the great majority of those on board ultimately survived. In this next part, I look at the subsequent wartime career of one of those survivors Denis Avey, and in particular the reliability of his accounts of how and why he has come to be regarded as a hero of the Holocaust.

One group of survivors of the torpedo attack is of particular interest as, 21 months later in September 1943, they ended up in Auschwitz Work Detachment E715. There they were forced to labour in the IG Farben factory in Monowitz with Jewish and other, largely political prisoners. Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel are two of the most renown chroniclers of KZ Monowitz, located a few miles from the extermination camp in Birkenau. The POWs were initially accommodated in one of ten camps surrounding the vast industrial complex, about 3/4 of a mile southwest of the factory. Midway of their 16 months in Monowitz, they moved to another camp adjacent to the factory in close proximity to the concentration camp. The new camp proved fatal as it was accidently bombed in the first Allied raid on the factory in August 1944, killing 38 POWs (a tragedy accentuated by only one POW being murdered by the Germans). Indeed, the POWs were kept under vastly different conditions, protected by the Geneva Convention, in receipt of Red Cross Parcels, and guarded by the Wehrmacht rather than the SS. Thus, the POWs were able to provide some assistance to their far less fortunate workmates. A number also testified in the 1947 IG Farben Trial in Nuremberg against the Directors of the factory and as witnesses to the plight of the Jews. Two later appeared in Norbert Wollheim’s Lawsuit v IG Farben in the early 1950s that opened up reparations for thousands of Jews; and one further appeared in the 1960s Auschwitz Frankfurt Trial. The man in all three trials was Charles Coward, the first British citizen to be recognised as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in 1963. He was also the subject of a BBC series ‘This Is Your Life’, and previously of a novel, The Password Is Courage (1954), made into a film in 1962. Coward died in 1976 and was posthumously honored ‘British Hero of the Holocaust’ (BHH) in 2010. BHH was conceived by the Holocaust Education Trust [HET], inspired by Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations honour.

The group who ended up in Auschwitz has to date realised six British names, though there is possibly another dozen or so, including South Africans, who may have followed the same path. The largest list discovered by the present researcher is dated 16 January and contains about 600 names. It yielded two remarkable pages that may even be deemed extraordinary. One page has three familiar names, including two mates from Gloucester; on the other page is the most renowned name, who beguilingly professed not to have been on such a list!

The phantom was Denis Avey. In November 2009 he became famous, and hugely controversial, following a BBC documentary that led to his nomination for the same honour as Coward, ‘British Hero of the Holocaust’. Avey was recognised for ‘helping German Jewish inmate, Ernst Lobethal, to survive Auschwitz’. But what captured the public imagination, and led to copious misreporting of this BHH, was Avey’s unsubstantiated claim to have exchanged identity with a Dutch Jew called ‘Hans’ to enter KZ Monowitz ‘to bear witness’ to the plight of the Jews’. It bore the title of the BBC program ‘The Break into Auschwitz’ and Avey’s subsequent memoir, The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz (2011).

A note on the above image, from Avey’s book: The caption is misleading. The medal ceremony was on 9 March. The ‘head-to-head’ was six weeks earlier in a meeting arranged by the Holocaust Education Trust. The medal ceremony photo PM Brown shaking Avey’s hand is printed in YV Martyrdom & Resistance, March/April 2010.  Avey was continuously recounting two different versions of his Swap story. A decade later, Gordon Brown did not recall what Avey told him: ‘I have no minutes of my conversation with Mr. Avey.’ [email to author, 23 March 2021]   

The book was co-authored by Rob Broomby, the BBC journalist who shot Avey to prominence in the documentary following his discovery of Lobethal’s 1995 Shoah Foundation video testimony. The book was endorsed by HET who published a 1-page ad of its mission on the back page, and HET’s ‘close friend and supporter’, the eminent historian Sir Martin Gilbert wrote a glowing Foreword, calling it ‘a most important book’, commending ‘The honesty of this book heightens its impact’, and verifying ‘the description of Buna-Monowitz is stark, and true’. HET’s cover-to-cover endorsement led the publishers to market the book as ‘an extraordinary true story’. It was translated into ‘a dozen languages’ and became an ‘international best seller’. In an interview for Imperial War Museum, HET’s Chief Executive, Karen Pollock called Avey ‘a special man’ and encapsulated the Trust’s role in his enterprise and sense of purpose late in his life: ‘We as an organization made that happen.’

However, Avey’s title story came under immediate scrutiny. Most transparent, the title was a verbatim of the blurb describing Coward, in paperback editions of his novel (1988 and 2001). The plagiarism was also ironic, considering the reasons for Coward’s BHH on the Government website: ‘a POW in Auschwitz, he was appointed Red Cross liaison for 1400 British POWs. He used this position to smuggle food and contraband to Jewish inmates and smuggled himself into the Jewish camp, in order to confirm the horrific conditions there.’ In fact, Coward’s mission was in search of a Czech Jew Dr Karel Sperber, who served in the British Merchant Navy, but Coward did not find him.

Equally strange, BHH did not include Coward’s most renown act for which YV honored him, ‘Coward had the idea of collecting precious chocolate and cigarettes from his fellow British prisoners, and exchanging them with a Auschwitz guards [sic] for dead bodies. He substituted these bodies for Jewish inmates who were then helped to escape.’ The ruse led to ‘400’ escapees according to Coward and as reported in the Israeli press during his visit in late 1962. It was well publicized, especially given an old friendship with a Palestinian POW, Yizhak Perski, father of Shimon Peres. Three decades later, a few years after his father’s death, Shimon and his brother Gershon sowed a myth that their father aided Coward in his ruse. They did so contra Coward and their father’s testimonies that he wasn’t even in Auschwitz! They met 50  miles away in a POW camp in Tost, from where they briefly escaped with two others in August 1942, and were recaptured separately and their paths didn’t cross again. Alas, Gilbert incorporated the Peres Brothers Myth in The Righteous (2002). Gilbert did not know Hebrew and did not use a translator when inspecting Coward’s YV file. Likewise, the American Holocaust historian, Dr Joseph Robert White, who wrote the seminal academic article on POWs in Auschwitz, “Even in Auschwitz… humanity could prevail.” (2001) Dr White corresponded with Shimon Peres, whom Gilbert knew well. In November 2008 Peres recounted the myth and its purported source in a speech during his visit to the UK Parliament House of Commons, as a guest speaker of Gordon Brown’s government. Peres opened with a recollection of his father’s friendship with Coward, with reference to his book: “We later learned from a bestselling book that he and my father found a way to save Jewish victims from the Auschwitz gas chambers.” In January 2012, Dr White initiated a quest by the UK authorities for declassification of documents of Persky in E715 Auschwitz, and his aiding and abetting Coward, that he suggested would be declassified in 2020. Dr White’s campaign was headed by the Jewish Chronicle, in a series of articles under the banner headline ‘Release the Auschwitz files’. JC marshalled Members of Parliament, The Ministry of Defence and The National Archives. Not surprisingly, following half a dozen articles by JC‘s Political Editor Martin Bright, tracking the case on a weekly basis, it turned out to be a wild goose chase. The official explanation, TNA ‘holds almost nothing from MI9 beyond a history of the section, written for internal consumption, and hundreds of questionnaires filled out by prisoners on release into British hands.’ In fact, the Hebrew documents in Coward’s VY file prove there were no witnesses to corroborate Coward’s ruse. The Righteous program was in its infancy, and the requisite proofs tightened over the decades, whence by today’s standards, Coward would not have been awarded. It may explain the omission in his BHH. [1]

Conversely, YV never acknowledged Coward’s Swap story. As it was included in his BHH, it might be due to his testifying to it in the 1947 IG Farben Trial. Extensive research reveals it to be a fascinating weave of fact and fiction, with two prominent Jewish survivors of KZ Monowitz, Norbert Wollheim and Siegfried Halbreich, as witnesses, along with a remarkable 1960s British testimony declassified in 2020, which includes a Foreign Office memo re ‘an old file’ on this case, backed by memorabilia from a number of families.   

YV acted no less peculiarly in Avey’s case. It initially swallowed media hype in misreporting BHH, ‘risked his life and swapped clothes with a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz.’ [Martyrdom & Resistance, p. 2 March/April 2010 Adar/Nissan 5770]. YV surreptitiously corrected its error in Nov 2010 when it sent Avey a private ‘Letter of Commendation’ for his aid to Lobethal; but corresponding with the publication of his book, YV issued a public statement, declining to recognise him as a Righteous for his unsubstantiated Swap story; no witnesses was the bottom line.  

Avey did not take kindly to the rejection. He branded YV as ‘Euclidean’ and berated its failure ‘to plant a tree in my name’. Avey had an even sharper tongue for his critics, for anyone who disbelieved him, ‘has an evil heart and should look in the mirror.’  

On reflection, the principal ‘evil hearts’ were Auschwitz-Birkenau Head of Research Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, USHMM Senior Historian Dr Peter Black, and World Jewish Congress General Counsel Menachem Rosensaft. The triumvirate expressed their ‘doubts’, ‘disbelief’ and ‘fears’ that Avey’s title story was ‘completely fabricated’, so providing ‘ammunition to Holocaust deniers.’ Rosensaft called on the UK & US publishers to undertake ‘an Independent Investigation’, but it was met with ‘detailed Rebuttals’ by the authors in concert with their UK commissioner, Hodder & Stoughton’s ‘publisher of non-fiction’, Rupert Lancaster.   

The universal concerns were astutely amplified by German scholar Dr Lorenz Jäger in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He spotlighted H&S like the German publisher of the book, Verlag Lübbe ‘tend towards entertainment literature’, with Avey’s book listed ‘history and adventure.’ He also questioned Gilbert’s ‘surprising’ endorsement, and his response to the controversies (‘A statement by Gilbert would certainly be desirable in this respect.’) Lastly, he lamented: ‘To make an old man like Avey into a fantasist is not something to be proud of, and to see him now exposed as a fabulist should not satisfy the audience either.’  Thus, he branded Broomby, ‘the evil mind behind the whole affair’, who with, ‘few historical scruples, must have smelled a milch cow for his own quick route to fame. The BBC must therefore also ask itself questions about its quality standards.’   

In answering Rosensaft’s call, the triumvirate were presented with the disquieting evidence that a year earlier, just a few weeks after Avey’s emergence on the BBC, a prominent US Holocaust Denier, Carolyn Yeager, in an article insightfully titled The Man Who Would Be Righteous, exposed Avey as ‘a fraud’, when he told a completely different version of his title story to the Daily Mail: ‘swapping with Ernst Lobethal’ and taking ‘his ID card‘, Avey went ‘with the Jewish prisoners to Birkenau….’ In addition to the change of location and different swap partner, Yeager pointed out, ‘the prisoners did not carry ID cards. That’s what the tattoos were for….’ This detail was omitted from the book, but in the review by New York Post, Dr Black posed the symmetrical question: ‘How did Hans access the British POW camp without the proper military papers, which German guards inspected upon each entry and exit?‘ Alas, Dr Black was unaware POWs didn’t carry papers but wore metal identity discs with POW numbers. [aka ‘Dog Tags’]– In sum, the practical issue of switching IDs in Auschwitz was ignored in the book and erroneously addressed in the media. 

Unbeknown to Yeager, the exchange with Ernst in Birkenau was first reported in January 2005 Daily Mirror by Royal Correspondent Jane Kerr, who graphically recorded: ‘Posing as his friend Ernst, he watched women and children being marched into the gas chambers. “I always wondered if they knew,” he says. “I hope not….”  

In their book, Avey & Broomby obfuscated the source of this version. They briefly recorded that a decade earlier Avey gave his first prominent interview to IWM: ‘I was struggling for the first time to bring it all back. There were things I had never really spoken about before and I am sure I got some of it tangled now but I had taken the first step.’ [p. 210] The vaguery was quickly, but ironically and disingenuously, spotlighted by three historians led by Guy Walters, a charismatic self-styled ‘Slayer of Junk History’. Walters noted an anomaly:  “On July 16, 2001, Mr. Avey gave a five-hour interview to the Imperial War Museum in which he spoke about his incarceration, as well as the psychological impact of the war and his problems with nightmares. Not once in this interview did Mr Avey talk about smuggling himself into Monowitz…. When asked why he did not mention the swap… he said: “I don’t know why. I didn’t choose to establish it then. But what I wrote in the book is the truth. I don’t have to defend it. I don’t mind what anybody says. I know what I’ve done.” . A few days later, in a ‘Detailed Rebuttal’ rebuking Walters and colleagues, it was noted: ‘While the Imperial War Museum’s card index does not mention the swap, the actual interview, which the Daily Mail journalists clearly haven’t listened to, DOES describe it.’  Avey’s response was ignored, and soon after the Rebuttal was deleted from the publisher and literary agent’s websites! [2]

The Double Bluff underpinning the euphemistic and dissembling rebuttal, disguised the fact that Avey recounted the Swap at length for 17 minutes, though not as in 2005. He originally swapped with Ernst’s anonymous bunkmate and accompanied Ernst to ‘Birkenau’ where Ernst told him about ‘an Australian POW who stoked the crematoria’. Avey went in a desperate but forlorn search for the Aussie. Half-a-century later, he serendipitously discovered the latter had published a memoir called ‘Stoker’, still, he had to go to extraordinary lengths to find a copy. It was no surprise. Though he acknowledged ‘many didn’t believe’, he failed to specify that this infamous 1995 memoir by Donald Watt was exposed as a hoax by the venerable Holocaust institutions, Auschwitz-Birkenau, USHMM, Fritz Bauer Institute and Yad Vashem, as recorded by the other leading critic in Australia, Professor Konrad Kwiet, in his article, ‘The Unbelievable Story of Donald Watt’. Two years later, ‘the book was withdrawn from sale in disgrace’ by its eminent publishers Simon & Schuster.  

Avey’s phantom search was evidently a mimic of Coward’s quest for Dr Sperber, the difference being that Dr Sperber actually was in KZ Monowitz.  Dr Setkiewicz and Mr. Rosensaft were interviewed by Walters and his article was posted on WJC website. Dr Black was the ‘expert’ for NYP. But, when presented with the Bluff and IWM transcript; in contrast to Watt, the triumvirate decided not to pursue the issue for various reasons, leaving a stench of appeasement. [3]

Thus, a long dossier was sent to HET & Gilbert with a request that he withdraw his Foreword. Gilbert curtly replied, ‘I see no reason to do so’. The Emperor’s New Clothes sprung to mind. A prominent Literary Agent, Andrew Lownie, concurred and contacted Sunday Times, as the book was still No 1 on ST ‘Non-Fiction’ list, with the aim of exposing the Bluff as a precursor to the revisionism of the IWM story, and Gilbert’s pretensions to knowledge he did not possess.

The revisionism was clearly a product of Broomby’s discovery of Lobethal’s video in Autumn 2009, in which Lobethal stated he was not in Birkenau, nor did he mention an exchange story. ‘It’s Avey whose filled in all the rest’, acutely noted by Yeager. Thus, the IWM story had to be suppressed and hastily revised for the November 2009 BBC documentary. It must have been cooked up in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or two. [4]

Lobethal’s testimony was all the more pertinent given Avey’s original IWM motive for accompanying ‘Ernst’ was to get his sister Susanne’ address in the UK. She arrived from Breslau on Kindertransport and was adopted by a family in Birmingham. Ernst was deported to Auschwitz in Jan ’43. Avey stated it was ‘forbidden to speak’ in the factory, so he would have to make ‘an umtausch – an exchange’ to accompany Ernst, and as a result obtained Susanne’s address, and learned about the Australian Stoker! 

Six years before Avey sowed his fabrication, Lobethal recalled that he and the POW he knew only as ‘Ginger’ met in the factory, where he gave the address. Avey acknowledged it in his memoir with some aplomb: ‘His memory differed a little in the detail. He thought I wrote the address down. I was sure I had memorised it but there it was as clear as day. He had remembered me and that’s what mattered.’ Avey then wrote to his mother, who forwarded the letter to Susanne, who sent Avey ‘ten packs of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate’, which he smuggled to Ernst, who likened it to ‘being given the Rockefeller Centre.’ Ernst managed to exchange for ‘various favours’, most importantly, ‘new heavy soles put on my boots for two packs of English cigarettes. It came to save my life on the death march in 1945.’ 

When confronted with ‘the IWM tapes’ in an ‘Interface’ for the Sunday Times article, ‘Hero of Holocaust changed his story’, with Avey now shielded by the publisher, Broomby was joined by his ‘mentor, James Long’, who ‘assisted with research, edit and structure of the manuscript’. The ‘co-authors’, argued the two versions were synonymous, according to their ‘research’ and ‘lengthy discussions’ with Avey. This entailed sifting through ‘the fog of war’, allied to Avey’s ‘PTSD’, whence his ‘confused, muddled memory’ required ‘disentangling and clarifying.’ Thus, disputing what Avey ‘said’, they contrived a hocus-pocus interpretation based on another dubious source, that led to their dubbing as ‘Charlatans and Magicians (conjurers of illusions).’ The entire exercise evoked One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, but it sadly elicited ‘A Fear of Libel’ and ‘stirring a vipers’ nest’ from the ST journalist and sub-editor, leading to an anodyne article, with the Bluffs omitted and the Watt connection diluted. Lownie summated, ‘ST did not do justice to what you gave them.’ It also had a swift detrimental effect. [5]

Quick as a flash, Walters ridiculed ST in a blog, perversely claiming precedence in exposing the IWM story. More disconcertingly, the Jewish Chronicle provided a platform to Avey’s IWM interviewer, Lyn Smith (also Karen Pollock’s interviewer). She passionately ‘defended’ Avey, ‘an utterly reliable… very upright person. I wouldn’t doubt him for a moment. He’s a very credible witness.’ As for the discrepancies: ‘People do sometimes make mistakes with names, particularly when it’s spontaneous and in the middle of an interview – this is to be expected. It was not my job to double-check the places and names he gave to me. But the author of the book, Rob Broomby, would have double-checked everything.’ To cap it all, she subversively ‘worried that the Sunday Times article might have unintended consequences. “Holocaust deniers may pounce on this and say that people have made up the whole thing. That’s what distresses me. But these were genuine mistakes about events which happened a long time ago.”

Alas, a decade after their interview, Lyn Smith was still oblivious of the fact that Avey could not have made up his story prior to Watt’s recent publication. Avey grafted it onto his appropriation of Coward’s story, woven round his aid to Lobethal, and summarily armed Holocaust deniers to the teeth. 

Smith repeated her defense in an April 2012 BBC whitewash of ‘the controversy’ raised by Sunday Times. BBC didn’t mention Watt! Nor Smith in her publication that year, Heroes of The Holocaust. Her chapter on Avey is mumbo-jumbo, likewise Coward, as she exposed the full extent of her ignorance of POWs in Auschwitz.  

The fatiguing disputes with the vested parties over Avey’s fabricated title story have long distracted from the truly remarkable issues. Thus, the life-saving aid to a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz should be considered all the more ‘extraordinary’, because Avey never revealed that prior to Auschwitz, he owed his life to the Jewish POW Bernard Friedlander. It is possible, as others, he didn’t discover it. Still, Friedlander is integral to any discussion of Avey’s life and award. Yet, the failure to even record Friedlander and his George Medal bears further testimony to Avey’s co-authors much trumpeted ‘research’. It truly reveals the manner Avey divorced himself from his personal and collective experience, before, during and after Auschwitz, in the process creating a mock-heroic fictional persona. The whiting out of Friedlander from the narrative captures the moment Avey cast adrift from reality.   

THE PHANTASMAGORIA OF ‘THE SOLE SURVIVOR’ OF THE TORPEDOED SHIP DISILLUSIONED BY ‘CO-AUTHORS’ BROOMBY & LONG 

Avey was captured at Sidi Rezegh. He was slightly wounded and after a short spell in Benghazi hospital, he ended up on the torpedoed ship. In lieu of being rescued, Avey invented a story of his own survival, underpinned by a ludicrous comment in his memoir, ‘For almost seventy years I had assumed that I was the sole survivor.‘ This story emerged in the 2001 IWM interview and is notable for the manner Broomby & Long purportedly disillusioned Avey, and in the process exposed themselves as dupes of his phantasmagoria.

The three key details in Avey’s narrative: 

In IWM, he was loaded onto the ship with ‘many Italian and German soldiers’ and ‘about 100 or more British prisoners’, slightly revised in the memoir, ‘scores of other allied prisoners, perhaps a 100 or more’.    

Following the torpedo and ensuing carnage, many died on board and jumping into the sea. IWM, ‘I went straight over the side.’ Memoir, ‘I tore my boots off and dived straight in‘. In the sea, he was confronted by ‘depth charges’ from ‘a sub-chaser…. scything through the survivors.’ He recalled the name, ‘something like the Centurion.’ More distinctly, ‘the ship went down in about 10 minutes, if that‘_; in the memoir-‘the stricken vessel was nowhere to be seen…. I always assumed she went down.’   

Avey was lucky to find ‘a twenty-foot crate’ or ‘a large wooden packing case floating in the water‘. He was joined by ‘Germans and Italians’, but they quickly drowned, leaving him to reminisce: ‘I held on through that long cold night in the hope of rescue, but the sea was empty…. As the sun came up, I fancied I saw land, a golden city on a hill. It could have been the sun on stone buildings; it could have been an hallucination. Time passed and I drifted briefly into consciousness again and this time there really was land in sight….’ (A touch of the Romantics, but no Coleridge). The float lasted ‘about 30 hours’ [IWM], revised ’20 hours’ a decade later. ‘After more or less a day, he was washed ashore’. [Broomby].  

In IWM, Avey came across ‘Greek farmers’, and stayed with them ‘about two months’, and setting off ‘in farmer’s clothing’ was soon captured by the Italians. In 2009 BBC documentary & book, he came across a single farmer, stayed a short time, and wearing his ‘military clothing’ under the farmer costume, fearing disguise as a civilian could lead to his execution, he proceeded to ‘hike the lengths of the Peloponnese’. Broomby illustrated with a map on screen, and once ‘recaptured’, the summary comment: ‘His career as a POW had begun.’  

Broomby televised without ‘research’. He and Long began after the book’s commission in ‘March 2010’. A few months later, ‘In summer 2010′, Broomby visited Avey with ‘astounding news’. He came armed with ‘the maps and the records’, after resolving the identity of the ship, which had been ‘a mystery for quite some time.’ It emerged the ship held ‘2000 or so allied prisoners’ and ‘most survived the attack’. 

Avey could not contain his amazement: ‘I couldn’t believe it, surely that wasn’t possible.’ Broomby expanded, ‘Sebastiano Venier didn’t go down, in fact it became famous for staying afloat.’   

Avey reiterated his incredulity: ‘I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying at first, I was convinced the ship was just minutes away from sinking when I dived off.’  Broomby explained, ‘The man who saved the ship and the remaining prisoners was a mysterious German who has never been identified to this day… he was probably a marine engineer but his consideration for the wounded prisoners was never forgotten and those who encountered him spoke of a man of great courage and humanity who, enemy or not, had saved hundreds of allied lives, though more died trying to get ashore from the beached ship.  

Avey further summarily underlined his incredulity: ‘I didn’t know about any of this because I was on the loose for some time before I was recaptured and I never came across the other survivors, though some it turned out had also passed through Dysentery Acre. I listened to what Rob was telling me, but I was still wrestling with my own memory. It was a fantastic story. Nothing could ever be certain after such a long time, but it was very hard to see how it could have been any other ship. I was staggered. It had been an appalling episode for me but like so much else it was swamped by what followed. Knowing so many men had survived that disaster was a relief. For almost seventy years I had assumed that I was the sole survivor. And then the penny dropped. I had no need to jump in the sea at all. “It looks like it,” Rob replied. Well what a silly-arse, I said.’   

Alas, the penny did not drop for the two silly-arses, led on a merry-dance by Avey’s feigned disbelief. They should have been flabbergasted when discovering twentyfold ‘100’ POWs, which did not reflect the shrinkage of Avey’s ‘memory’, but the distortion of facts lending a veneer of credibility to his story. The co-authors not only failed to question how he recalled so few POWs on a ship transporting 2000? Since it famously stayed afloat, how could he possibly recall it sinking in a few minutes? And as ‘most survived’, if only ‘some’ ended up in ‘Dysentery Acre’, what happened to the rest? Finally, it begs belief how Broomby & Long could equate the two accounts ‘on the loose’. In truth, fast & loose describes Avey’s storytelling.    

Broomby & Long’s sources were not recorded till the 2nd edition, when in response to the criticism of the title story, they added ‘Notes on Sources’, Bibliography & Index. Thus, it transpired that in addition to naval logs, they used two memoirs by New Zealanders, the former ‘general’ who witnessed the incident from the Centauro, Brigadier, James Hargest who published in 1945: the latter, Edge’s No Honour, No Glory (1983). Still, they obfuscated that the German engineer was not the only one credited in getting the POWs ashore, blatantly ignoring Edge’s account of the operation.   

JA Editor David Saks contemplated and concluded, ‘I suppose it is just possible that Avey, unlike the other prisoners saved by Friedlander’s brave initiative, did indeed manage to float ashore on top of a packing crate as he claimed, but since he was then recaptured after landing and spent the next several months with other rescued prisoners from the ship, Friedlander included, he knew very well he was not “the sole survivor”.’   

The evidence against Avey’s solo float is the 16 January 1942 Italian telegram of some 600 names to ICRC. ‘DENIS AVEY 6914761” [service number]. Stated otherwise, if Avey alone evaded capture for ‘about two months’, he would have been on a list of one, dated c. February 1942! 

There is extensive evidence for Avey casting adrift from the collective experience. He first mentioned the incident on 19 May 1945, shortly after he and his father George, also a POW, were repatriated. The local paper West Essex Gazette reported their return. Only Denis was interviewed: ‘The son was taken prisoner in Tobruk and was taken to Benghazi for transportation to Italy. “The ship was torpedoed but we managed to get to Greece. After two or three months we were recaptured by the Germans and sent to Italy,” he says.’ However, recapture by Germans did not accord with Avey’s record a week earlier in his 8 May 1945 Liberation Questionnaire, wherein he omitted the torpedo incident, but provided a conjunctive clue in response to the question ‘ESCAPES’: ‘YES. PYLOS GREECE. DEC. 1941 RECAPTURED DEC 1941 By ITALIAN MILITARY POLICE. PHYSICAL FITNESS BAD.’ 

Since the torpedo was on 9 December 1941, it clearly supports the ICRC record, implying that after being ‘rescued’, Avey briefly escaped and was recaptured by the Italians. Alas, in his memoir, Avey neither recalled his brief escape, nor Pylos. He rather created his Greek Odyssey, followed by three escape stories, two preceding Auschwitz and one following it, none recorded in his May 1945 POW Statement!    

The 1945 expression, ‘but we managed to get to Greece’ clearly exposes the disingenuous: ‘For almost seventy years I had assumed that I was the sole survivor.’   

Avey’s 21st Century fabrications are predicated on a couple of categorical statements: In his memoir he implicitly denied completing a Lib Q, ‘I think they handed out forms to the lads coming home later asking for their experiences as prisoners.’ [p. 192] A decade earlier, in IWM: “My POW record is not available now. I tried to find it. I can’t find the record. But in any case, they could have altered things.  I realised that they could have altered things, or defaced them, or lost them, or taken them out. I would like to have got hold of my first photograph. They completely beheaded me, shaved me, and then put a number round my neck, on a chain, and photographed me frontward and sideway. I must have looked like nothing on earth.”   

In sum, Avey conveyed there are no records to verify his stories, which perversely project all his fears of what ‘they could have’ done with them! Though his Personalkarte with photo & POW number did not survive, it was one of some 500 from E715 unaccounted for in Bavaria in March/April ’45. Still, considering all the details in the personal card could be verified from other archives, a rudimentary inquiry with ICRC evidently did not cross his mind.    

Worse, Avey did not contact the Foreign Office, who administered his 1966 Nazi Persecution Compensation [NPC] resulting from the 1964 Anglo-German Agreement. In his memoir, Avey printed a photo of the cheque, only to complain at the miserly sum; but conveniently neglected to mention that the document used to verify his claim was his ‘1945 POW Statement’, noted in FO Minutes of his case, declassified in 2019, four years after Avey’s death. In other words, in his memoir, Avey denied the very document on which his 1966 award was based! [6]

“IT DIDN’T SEEM RIGHT” – ‘AN HABITUAL TROUBLEMAKER’ SENT TO AUSCHWITZ FROM A PUNISHMENT CAMP IN GRAUDENZ. MARCH 1943’’ – AVEY’S ‘FALSE’ NAZI PERSECUTION COMPENSATION 2001-06 – BLUEPRINT OF HIS ‘MEMOIR’ MOCK-HEROIC FICTIONAL PERSONA:  

Avey’s 2011 acknowledgement of his 1966 NPC, but brazen denial of his Lib Q, is predicated on a second NPC in 2001 – 06. A German Government & Industries program was administered by Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft [EVZ] and its partner organizations. The International Order for Migration [IOM] adjudicated the cases of Allied POWs.     

POWs were nominally ‘rejected on the grounds that prisoners of war were not considered eligible.’ Avey alone appealed and overturned the verdict in Sept 2006: ‘The appeals body concluded, “the applicant had been subjected to forced labour in a concentration camp, or in another place of confinement under comparable conditions as defined under the Foundation Act”.’ This evidently caused consternation amongst the others who ‘felt unfairly rejected’ and encouraged to appeal by the President of The National Ex-POW Association, Les Allan, in a Newsletter Winter 2006. Far from viewing Avey as a divisive figure, Allan attributed his success to ‘his sheer bloody-minded persistence.’ Still, in his memoir, Avey magnanimously acknowledged, “It didn’t seem right.”  

The reason for Avey’s award manifested following EVZ consent to lift Data Protection in 2023. It unearthed 9 ex-Auschwitz POW claimants, which rendered Avey unique, as the only one to have made two claims four decades apart and receive compensation both times. It further revealed that one other made an unsuccessful appeal, and three others were also subject of biographies, though none mentioned their rejected claim! [7]

Avey’s two NPCs highlight a schism. The former based on 20^th C. historical documentation, the latter on Avey’s 21^st C. storytelling. Two lengthy reports proved the latter was predicated on a fabricated POW history, which the IOM Appeals-Body failed to detect due to inadequate archival material provided by EVZ’s ‘historical experts’. The reports summarily requested that IOM / EVZ rescind Avey’s award and reclaim the money [DEM 15,000] from his Estate.  

IOM defended its ‘robust methodology’ based on EVZ protocols and refused to answer any questions. – EVZ ruled it was IOM’s legal jurisdiction, but acknowledged, ‘an erroneous decision by the IOM’ based on Avey’s ‘false information’. However, EVZ found the request for it to take responsibility most difficult, ‘considering a devastating message when a German foundation reclaims compensation 20 years after the payment program.’      

The key to Avey’s fraudulent claim was his omission that he had been ‘A RECIPIENT OF ANOTHER GOVERNMENT PROGRAMME’ & ‘REPATRIATION DOCUMENT’.    

Avey’s obfuscation of his 1966 award may also have proved extremely selfish; as the Foreign Office concluded POWs in Auschwitz were an exception to the same rule that only those in ‘Concentration Camps or comparable conditions,’ were eligible; but in the case of POWs in Auschwitz, ‘working alongside working parties from the concentration camp’, whose ‘ill-treatment… sometimes rubbed off on the prisoners-of-war.’ If this nuanced decision leading to compensation of ‘all’ 32 Auschwitz POWs had been known to IOM, it would have had a template to rule favorably in its own cases.    

Indeed, EVZ adopted a more lenient and empathetic approach than the 1960s, whereby ‘credible’ testimonies of aged claimants conveying ‘historic plausibility’ were deemed satisfactory where documentation was lacking. Thus, IOM Appeals-Body found ‘Reasoning’ to review Avey’s case, based on a new detail he introduced in his Appeal: ‘I was no model prisoner & as a result spent time in a punishment camp at Graudenz – subsequently sent to Auschwitz (Monowitz).’ Dated ‘Year 1943/ Month 3’. Though it was considered, ‘not a usual pattern, it remains credible especially in light of the victim’s personal statement and appeal. Since the victim mentions a reason for punishment and a stay in a BEG-listed camp [Concentration Camp… or comparable conditions], the appeal can be recommended for Reversal in the Slave Labour Category.’    

EVZ source ‘ITS Archive’ was governed by ICRC at the time, but ITS inexplicably failed to contact ICRC for its POW records that informed FO in the 1960s. Thus, IOM Appeals-Body also based in Geneva were oblivious of Avey’s records under their noses!    In March ’43 Avey was in PG 65 in southern Italy, and never came close to Graudenz! Yet, he was there ‘twice’ on the BBC, interspersed with a period in a mine with Russians, where he miraculously escaped death in front of a firing squad, before returning to the singular in his memoir, ‘I was a habitual troublemaker’, sent ‘to the punishment camp at Graudenz in northern Poland.’ In a more graphic account than IWM, he made the cocky hubristic error of declaring Graudenz the place he received his POW number ‘220543’, and from where he was sent alone ‘with a couple of guards’ to Auschwitz. 

In fact, Avey received his Personalkarte at Stalag IVB Muhlberg on 22 July’43 in a line of 800, including the Gloucester mates and two others from the torpedo. All five were transferred to VIIIB Lamsdorf on 9 August, and with more than 700 to E715 IG Farben Auschwitz on 16 September 1943. Avey was in Lamsdorf Block 7, listed under his profession, ‘Engineers & Technicians’. It all accorded with his Lib Q of May 1945. [8]

In entertaining Avey’s ahistorical fabrication IOM exposed its ignorance of the history of E715. EVZ ‘historical experts’ failed to provide Dr Setkiewicz’ PhD thesis, duly published, The Histories of Auschwitz IG Farben – Werk Camps 1941 – 1945 – ‘The first full, wide-ranging study of the activities of the German IG Farben company in Auschwitz during World War II.’ The company’s decision to bring POWs was on ‘9 September ’43, during the 25th construction conference held at Auschwitz’, and the first group arrived ’16 September’. IOM Appeals-Body compounded its ignorance by imagining E715 was ‘A BEG-Listed camp’ and failing to consider Avey’s ‘group or category’ of fellow POWs.  

The IOM faults in Avey’s case were exasperated by the posthumous case of the above-mentioned Donald Watt. He received NPC from the Australian Concentration Camps Committee in 1990 for his Stoker story, which lent credence and emboldened him to write his memoir. He died in 2000, but his widow Joan made an IOM claim and disclosed his previous award. Despite EVZ instructions, ‘Decisions made in other programs should not be trusted blindly’, the case was accepted without a stick and a dog.    

IOM similarly lent ‘credibility’ to Avey’s fabrications and encouraged him to further embellish his stories. Thus, IOM award became the blueprint for Avey’s mock-heroic fictional persona, whence ‘the sole survivor, on the loose for a couple of months in the Peloponnese’ evolves into ‘a habitual troublemaker sent to Auschwitz as a punishment’, there to mutate into ‘the man who broke into Auschwitz.’  

This long string of transparent fictions, exposed at every turn by Avey’s POW records and 1945 Statement, and woven round the verifiable aid to Lobethal, evokes the insoluble question of physics, how long is a piece of string? The rope that Friedlander hauled to shore at the risk of his own life, saved many men.

Now viewed through the prism of the BHH award, the conclusion is startling, without Friedlander’s heroics, Avey may not have even made it to the Greek coast alive, and as a result Lobethal would probably not have survived Auschwitz. If we believe “History (or Truth) is stranger than fiction…”, this episode certainly provides one example.    

It summarily accentuated the pretensions of Avey’s co-authors, who visited Auschwitz, met Dr Setkiewicz, and his book is listed in their Bibliography. Alas, it was deceptive decoration, whose real function was to forensically expose various details in the fabricated title story. As for Gilbert, his ignorance and negligence beg belief.   

The falsifications and fabrications continued aplenty following liberation. Thus, the more disquieting evidence emerges, that IOM Appeals-Body were not only ignorant dupes. They colluded with Avey on the one aspect for which he did provide documentation, his medical claims, which opens up another vista on Avey’s history and stories, highlighting the issue of bearing witness, in which Gilbert exposed his indifference to Avey’s Testimonial schisms.

AVEY’S TESTIMONIAL SCHISMS – GASLIGHTING SUSANNE LOBETHAL AND WHITEWASHING ‘BEST MAN’ CYRIL EDWIN WRIGHT, POW AUSCHWITZ

Avey submitted 2 Medical Certificates in support of his IOM claim that were removed from his file. Two years of hospitalization for Systemic TB ‘immediately’ he was repatriated. And as a result of an assault by an SS officer the loss of an eye c. 1961 in his memoir. He concluded:  ‘My physical condition was impaired for many years, but my mental condition is still impaired at eighty-two years of age.’

IOM Appeals-Body acknowledged ‘the assault’ and concurred, ‘His physical condition was so bad that he had to stay two years in hospital after his liberation.’ The removal of the certificates was not a redaction, as those of others remained in their file. 

Though IOM A-B could not vouch for the assault, it can be readily dismissed, since Avey did not record it either in his ’45 Lib Q which would have led him to file a ‘Q’ Form for War Crimes, nor in his 1966 NPC. In the latter he did record Systemic TB, but did not provide a medical certificate nor pensions disability required for additional compensation.[9]

Nevertheless, Avey repeated his TB story in the decade leading to his memoir. A year before the book when it was printed in a Times article by Jake Wallis Simons, who further elicited Gilbert’s comments, it was questioned by Yeager, ‘I think it’s certain the British or American Army would have hospitalized him right there if he had TB, not transported him “sick” and “half-dead” to his parents’ home…. I would like to see the official military record for Mr. Avey!’ 

Yeager was rightly sceptical, as in the memoir, the hospitalization was revised nine months later, following Avey’s ‘demob in early 1946.’ The intermediary period akin to a pregnancy was filled with Avey’s visit to Susanne in Birmingham to bring her news of her brother Ernst’s likely demise on the Death March from Auschwitz, further trips to London, Liverpool and Southampton following return from leave in Winchester Barracks. He also received ‘a mysterious phone call’ from Paris by a Jewish survivor of Monowitz, ‘Merge’ (nicknamed ‘Mops’), who ‘made contact through the Red Cross’, leading to 4 local Jewish boys visiting his home, fed by his mother, but ‘leaving us mystified.’ ‘The latter episode also proves to be deeply ironic.

BBC filmed the ’reunion’ of Avey & Susanne, who recalled the visit of May 1945, following which they lost contact, so Avey never discovered Ernst survived. They watched ‘a snippet’ of Ernst’s SF video of his recollection of ‘Ginger’. In the memoir, it further transpired the German siblings ‘hadn’t seen each other for many years after the war and then very rarely’; and Susanne & Avey weren’t shown Ernst’s entire video. Avey recorded, ‘I waited twelve months to see: the full story of Ernie Lobet’, due to Broomby’s delays. 

The photo in Avey’s book of Susanne looking up to Avey with Caption: ‘Meeting Ernie’s sister Susanne again after sixty-four years. When we first met in 1945, I was a deeply traumatized soldier unable to bring her any comfort about the fate of her brother.’ — Susanne’s comment in the book, ‘‘You were very tall. It’s the only thing I remember about you.” 

This provoked the disarming question, when did Susanne discover her brother was still alive? Ernst’s vivid recollection was whitewashed from the BBC and memoir: ‘I had always known her address, and so it was fairly simple to just write, the moment I was in France… she immediately answered and then… a special telephone line that was established for G.I’s… you could be connected with anybody in England, so I talked to her almost daily on the phone…  and before I came here, I saw her….’

Lobethal’s testimony was endorsed by a close friend liberated together, Peter Wolff, who also recorded an SF video, and wrote a memoir Ein Überleben: Ein deutscher Jude im 20. Jahrhundert Libri Vitae (2008). Wolff recalls, ‘8 May VE Day celebrations in Paris’ [p. 108]. Thus, Ernst must have contacted Susanne before VE Day. Coincidentally, the day Avey was repatriated and wrote his Lib Q. Thus, if he had visited Susanne, she would have informed him of Ernst’ survival. The episode seemed to disguise a deep regret at the realization how simple it would have been to make contact given they had each other’s addresses, including Ernst.

The evidence conveys Avey & Broomby ‘gaslighted’ Susanne. Ernie’s ex-wife Ardeth agreed. Their eldest daughter Ingrid didn’t like the expression, but concurred, ‘It makes no logical sense that Ernie’s one wish of this gentile in the concentration camp would be to notify his sister know where he was, and that he would then ignore her once he finally survived and got to freedom.’ Ingrid provided a psychoanalytical profile of Sussanne, and echoing Avey’s confession of his impaired mental condition, she berated Broomby: ‘I have not read the book and don’t wish to. I did not have faith in Broomby and have no interest in his work. He seemed to be in it for himself and had remarkable disregard for the truth. I was so sorry he was a journalist, because he is no credit to the profession.’ A journalist herself, Ingrid shared the sentiment of Dr Jäger. Susanne refused to be interviewed, and USC SF who holds the Copyrights, did not respond to the request to legally challenge the publishers.

As his ‘immediate’ post-war fabrications collided, Avey was compelled to keep the latter visit to Susanne by its BBC broadcast. As for the hospitalization, after a long period in Manchester Royal Infirmary, he recuperated in Baguley Sanitorium. He dated his discharge in ‘late 1947’, shortly before his mother’s death on ‘8 December 1947’. Following the funeral, on return to Manchester, ‘it was a while before I got a job’, then met his bride Irene, and they ‘married quite quickly’, which conveys the nebulous matrimonial date was sometime in 1948.  

Both accounts are proven false by the Marriage Certificate 14 October 1946, and NHS record: ‘Unfortunately from a search of 1945-1949 no entry for Denis was found in the Baguley Sanatorium Admission Register._‘’ These two primary documents are supported by various articles in West Essex Gazette, reporting Avey’s participation in village and family functions, marriage in Manchester following demob in Feb ’46, and where he found an engineering job, and returned annually to play cricket for the village team till 1952. It summarily suggests the earliest he could have been hospitalized for a two-year period is 1952-54. [10]

The false accounts of the 2 yrs hospitalization were intimately related to Avey’s need to explain why after risking his life ‘to bear witness’, he failed to do so. The question was posed in the Sunday Times Interface: ‘Did he testify to the US or UK authorities? In the 2001 IWM interview he says he had ‘four days interrogation’ at liberation by the US military. In the book, he says he ‘spoke to no one’. As for the UK authorities, in the tape he says there was ‘no interrogation, no debriefing’ – yet in the book he says “I told them what I could about the slavery, the beatings and the random murders.” Broomby & Long replied: ‘we established that his ‘debriefing’ had been done by army officers at the Winchester barracks, as the book says (p192) but they had been remarkably uninterested in his account of his experiences. The American authorities apparently wanted to interview him with regard to evidence for war crimes trials but did not do so. Denis collapsed with systemic tuberculosis at that time, spent many months seriously ill in hospital, underwent several operations and then had a long convalescence afterwards.  His memory of that period is consequently very poor.’

The co-authors conveniently overlooked an E715 War Crimes report issued at Winchester Barracks by Geoffrey Richard Amery only three weeks after Avey was repatriated, when he was on leave at home. They also ignored a 2004-05 interview of Avey by historian Diarmuid Jeffreys, recording that in 1947 Avey was traced by an American prosecutor Maurice Amchan to provide an affidavit for the IG Farben Trial, but he was in hospital too ill to testify. [11]

Avey similarly had to provide an explanation as to why there were no witnesses to his title story. He recounted: ‘There were just two lads in our camp that I let in on the plot, Bill Hedges and Jimmy Fleet….’ Hedges was from Manchester. Avey visited soon after his demob, when he fell ill, and Hedges rushed him to hospital. Not recorded, Hedges and Fleet died in 1982 and 1986 respectively.

Avey’s Marriage Certificate, allied to the WEG report of the marriage, suggests another man would have been even closer to Avey, namely his ‘Best Man’, Cyril Edwin Wright, who was in E715 for its entire duration, furthermore, was a local Essex man from Buckhurst Hill, close to Avey’s village in North Weald Bassett. It only seems from Wright’s Lib Q with a quite different POW history preceding Auschwitz, that he met Avey in Auschwitz, where they evidently became best friends, which further suggests they shared the same hut, and possibly bunk-beds. In any case, we should expect Wright would have been in on the plot. Instead, Avey whitewashed his likely best mate! 

In sum, Avey belatedly invented war stories for his post-war maladies, and to embellish his failure to testify and provide witnesses for his title story. The testimonial schisms were endorsed willy-nilly by Gilbert, though it would require a detailed analysis of Gilbert’s comments in Simons’ Times article to fully assess his role and understanding of the issues. 

Yet, to fully comprehend Avey’s still impaired mental condition, and his abuse of the Lobethal family, we need explore his abysmal treatment of his own family, most notably his father. 

“ANOTHER STORY ALTOGETHER” – AVEY’S DENIAL OF HIS FATHER GEORGE IN E715 AUSCHWITZ IN SUMMER 1944; AVEY FAMILY COVENANT OF SILENCE AND DENIS GASLIGHTING HIS COUSIN WENDY ORGLES 

Since Avey’s death, it has emerged that he was twice interned with relatives. In spring 1943, he was joined in PG 65 by a cousin, Gordon. Far more extraordinary and providing the most acute insight into his fabrications and nefarious testimonies, was a denial of his father George as a fellow POW in Auschwitz: ‘He lived until 1960, but we never talked about the war or compared our experience of captivity. Not once. I don’t think he ever knew I had been in a camp near Auschwitz.’ [p. 186]

Avey had been more specific in IWM: ‘In the last letter I got [from my mother, in Auschwitz], I realised that my father was a POW, and that’s all…. We never talked about it at all. We just went fishing and fishing and fishing in country becks, what have-you…. Thank God he survived the war and got back to England. But that’s another story. That’s indeed another story altogether’.

Avey’s denial upheld by his co-authors and publishers, who consequently ‘plan changes to new editions of bestseller as researcher raises alarm’, was reported in May 2022 in The Observer (‘Hero or Hoax?’). The paper viewed German POW records, most notably a medical record proving George was in E715 in Summer 1944, allied to a startling photo of father & son centre of a group in military uniform. It drew the responses of HET & IWM. The former ‘dissociated itself_’ from its nominated Hero with a Statement: “Upholding the truth and integrity of the Holocaust is vital, and when new information comes to light it must be taken seriously.” IWM ‘distanced itself…. The museum’s file containing Avey’s testimony has now been flagged with a public warning.’ The ‘NB’ is accompanied by ‘a Supplementary file’. [12]

The IWM file further reveals the evidence was long available. On 19 May 1945 WEG reported, George & Denis ‘applied for transfer to each other’s camps’ and it was George who was transferred from ‘Austria’ to Denis’ camp in ‘Cracow, Poland’. It was not unusual to find this designation in local papers, as Auschwitz had yet to become a familiar name. The prominent Avey paternal family in North Weald Bassett further published their knowledge of their relatives in a 1985 local history book by national politician, history teacher and genealogist Stan Newens, followed by two journals in 2011 and 2014. [13] Though Newens only stated, ‘George Jnr was a Prisoner of War in the same camp as his son Denis’, his source was George’s youngest brother Fred, who died in 1989. His son Ken, ex-Mayor of Epping Town died in 2014. Ken’s son Nigel, future Mayor, dictated an Obituary to a clerk: ’Ken’s cousin Denis and his Uncle George were in the same POW camp at the same time during WW 2, where Denis actually swapped places with a jewish [sic] prisoner for a night to see what conditions were like inside Auschwitz. He later wrote a book on the subject, The Man who broke into Auschwitz.’

Another Town Councilor and Church Warden of St Andrews NWB, J. Alan Smith, wrote two unpublished articles, ‘The Avey Family’ (July 2010); and a review of Denis book (April 2011). In the former, he stated: ‘For a father and son to have fought in the same war must be relatively rare, but for a father and son to be in the same POW camp must be almost unique’. The review did not mention George, but Smith highly commended, Denis’ forays into Auschwitz, ‘which makes the expression “above and beyond the call of duty” barely adequate.’

Though he knew Denis lied about his father, Smith still believed the title story! It must be extremely difficult to suppress what one believes to be unique. Yet, it does not explain Ken and Nigel’s reticence. We can imagine their shock to discover what Denis published for commercial consumption. But how long could they remain traumatized? They clearly preferred to shroud George and cover themselves in a veil of silence. Yet their message seems loud and clear, the living has preference over the dead, and even when the culprit dies, the truth should be buried with him. The issue was compounded by Newens who died six years after Denis, summarily suggesting a Conspiracy or Covenant of Silence.

In 2021-22, confronted by email, Nigel brazenly contradicted the Obituary: ‘I was not aware that George had been incarcerated with Denis.’ He cited his aunt, his father’s sister, Wendy Orgles, “who knew Denis well. Her thoughts on the issue… they may have been in the same POW camp. However, Denis was transferred to E175 [sic], not George, for bad behaviour.’ Wendy’s ‘thoughts’ seemed to be a composite of WEG & Denis’ contrivance of Graudenz. In any case, Denis evidently gaslighted Wendy, a familiar behavioral pattern from his antics with Ernst’s sister Susanne. Wendy and Nigel did not respond to the offer to meet and show them the documents.  

Still, no one specified when and how long George and Denis were together. WEG (May 1945 stated) ‘ten days’, a gross error, though not simple to resolve. George’s Lib Q has a tantalizing lacuna of 3 months, June – August 1944. He recorded a move from Austria to Lamsdorf then Hospital in Tost, where he remained a month till he was moved to Teschen in Sept. In 2018 George’s German POW records were declassified, and with his ICRC records, it proved he was initially transferred to Teschen on 3 June ’44; and a medical card records him departing E715 Auschwitz on Aug 23 for Lazarette Tost suffering from Chronic Rheumatism, where he remained till 20 Sept, then transferred to Lamsdorf. Consequently, the long trip in June from Austria to Teschen suggests George was immediately transferred to Auschwitz, a train ride of 50 miles. 

George arrived in E715 a week after the camp moved on 26 May ’44 and departed three days after the fatal bombing of 20 August. Consider if George was killed, would Denis have failed to mention his father? Instead, Denis continued to colour his palette, aptly summated by one of his most vociferous critics, fellow E715 veteran, Brian Bishop: ‘Avey describes how he dug out the men who were injured and the book reads as if he did it all on his own. When he talks about the 38 graves being dug in the town, you’d think he did all that, too.’ The giveaway in this instance, ‘There were a few lads around but there was no ceremony or service that I remember.’  [p. 154] The contemporaneous records of those who attended on the 22^nd prove to the contrary. E715 S.A. medic Dr William Oliver Harrison recorded it in his daily diary, noting with him Teschen Camp Leader RSM Frederick C. Read & NZ Padre John Hiddlestone, who further noted in his Funeral Diary, ‘the burial service taken by Polish Priest Father Adalbek Bardosik’, and Irish POW Bernard Chilvers ‘read 8 Roman Catholic prayers.’ Denis presumably was busy looking after his sick father, and the bombing may have hastened George’s departure.

Lastly, not ‘unique’, another father & son in E715, the Westlakes from Bristol, who had been together from captivity in Gazala in May/June ‘42. The Aveys’ case is explained by Geneva Convention, ‘Special Agreements between the British & Germans arising out of Prisoners of War Sick & Wounded Conventions…  so far as practical considerations allow close family relatives shall be interned in the same camp together’.

The photo taken a month before the bombing is deemed “not conclusive” by Avey’s co-authors. They dabbled with the idea, as reported in The Observer, ‘they believe there were between 800 and 1,000 prisoners in E715 and that it might still have been possible for father and son to have been in different buildings’, before categorically dismissing it, ‘Avey and his father were not in the same prison camp, E715, as the book makes completely clear’. This illusion was conjured by the Magician Long in lead up to the article: ‘Denis’s father George had never been in E715.’ & ‘There were never two prisoners called Denis and George Avey in E715 because are the same person.’  Long cited Denis’ Birth Certificate, ‘George Denis’, without comparison of his father ‘George Albert’. Long was also oblivious of the name change ‘Denis George’ when he was 2 yrs old recorded in the 1921 Census, followed by military, POW and Liberation records of two distinct men, DoBs, service & POW numbers, residing at the same address with Mrs. Sarah Louise Avey, ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ respectively. Long had summarily flown away with the faeries to Never-Never Land.

Broomby and Long were further guilty of falsifying the transfer date of the POW camp shortly before George’s arrival. It was recorded in a Protecting Power report of its visit to E715 on 20 June 1944. The POW numbers was ‘643’, and it’s difficult to imagine father & son in the same camp for 3 months without noticing each other. Broomby & Long following Avey mislabeled it ‘ICRC Report’, and nebulously dated the transfer ‘early 1944’, evidently to suit the chronology of the Swap story, wherein it required many weeks and months of preparation for the Swap with the Dutch Jew in the adjacent camp in ‘Summer ‘44’, which took place shortly before the bombing of August 20. A comparative profile E715 photo of George with one in Denis’ book, undated, but seemingly about a decade earlier, show a striking resemblance, but requires a forensic expert to verify it.  Wendy Orgles could also identify her uncle whom she knew for the first 17 years of her life. 

Avey most probably had a copy that he failed to disclose. That is judging by another photo of himself in an E715 football team, surprisingly not England, but South Africa! He explains, it was nominally S.A. as there weren’t enough nationals, others made up the numbers. However, his caption (see image below) is misleading: ‘I have always suspected the photographs were a propaganda ploy by the Wehrmacht to distinguish their handling of the POWs from the SS treatment of the Jews.’ There are infinite like photos throughout the POW camps, the vast majority not in proximity to Jews; while the SS did not advertise its ‘treatment of the Jews’. An appropriate caption would highlight Avey’s representing S.A. in the shadow of his ‘rescue’ by Friedlander. 

Both sets of the above group photos were taken in the last two weeks of July and the first week of August 1944. Further evidence suggests the military groups were from rooms within the huts. Thus, Denis also likely shared a bunk with his father. Denis ‘Best Man’ Wright might be also in the photo, but no comparison emerged to date. A comparative photo of Hedges in the Manchester Evening News suggests he was not in the E715 photo. No comparative photo of Fleet has emerged.

‘AN AMAZING PARADOX’: E715 PHOTO OF DENIS & GEORGE one of 5 ‘FORENSICS’ DISPROVING THE TITLE STORY IN KZ MONOWITZ

The PP report and two photos serve a further purpose. In the 2012 BBC whitewash, Broomby declared: ‘I am the first person to go through that story forensically with him, and I am absolutely convinced we’ve got that story right.’ Broomby’s conviction does not bear scrutiny, and he should have been challenged by Dr Setkiewicz who was also interviewed in the program. For the ‘Swap story’ to be ‘true’, requires alignment of the history of E715 & KZ Monowitz in Summer ’44. Five Forensics disprove it. 

Firstly, the falsification of the chronology of E715 in the PP report conveys ‘the story’ is ahistorical. Its parameters could only realistically be after the camp transfer and before the bombing, corresponding with George’s period in Auschwitz. which would have made him Denis’ primary ‘Witness’ to his heroic Swap story.  

Secondly, both photos show Denis with a full crop of hair. Yet, to imitate a Jewish prisoner: ‘I hacked off my hair with a pair of old scissors and then shaved off the rest with a blunt razor.’ Clearly not in this period. 

Three forensics relative to KZ Monowitz are recorded in some detail in Dr Setkiewicz’s book, supported by numerous Jewish memoirs. The most pertinent, also included in Broomby-Long Bibliography, Paul Steinberg’s Speak You Also (1996). Steinberg was infamously portrayed by Primo Levi as the scheming ‘Henri’ in If This is A Man, and Steinberg’s book is considered a response. 

Steinberg requires citation in response to Avey witnessing ‘a hanging corps’ and attending ‘morning roll call’. In prerequisite, during the year preceding the book, the corps had a distinguished prehistory, ‘over the gate’, ‘just beyond the gate‘, finally in the book, ‘further into the camp a shaven-headed body was hanging motionless from a gibbet.’

No one questioned this nebulous detail, it was passed off as a cliche, what we would expect in Auschwitz.

Steinberg described events in Summer 1944 at the time of the Hungarian deportations and mass extermination: ‘By an amazing paradox, while this last massacre is going on and the system is approaching, industrially speaking, absolute perfection, the camp regimen has become less harsh. They have eliminated the morning roll call and shortened the evening one. There hasn’t been a public hanging for the last three months.’ 

The ‘amazing paradox’ illuminates hangings in Monowitz were relatively rare and in a specific location, the Appelplatz, (roll call square), as recalled in numerous memoirs. The death records, known as The Monowitz Totenbuch, prove there were no hangings in KZ Monowitz for a three month period, May 30 – August 26, 1944.

More precisely, Avey could not have been in the Appelplatz, as he recalled lengthy rollcalls his first night and next morning: ‘We shuffled out to the Appelplatz where we were counted and recounted again.’ Dr Setkiewicz rather supports Steinberg: ‘In 1944 morning roll calls cancelled in order to save time and prisoners were henceforth ordered to immediately assemble in their respective Kommando columns.’

In the Appelplatz, Avey should have rather noticed two huge tents, housing 1000 prisoners each.  Many recalled the tents, especially those who stayed in them as Steinberg and Wiesel, and they are clearly visible in Allied aerial photographs. Dr Setkiewicz terms them ‘large canvas’_‘. Broomby & Long failed to identify them in a Legend map of KZ Monowitz which they printed in the book. Consequently, Avey could not have been in the Appelplatz as he did not see what he could not fail to miss, and Broomby & Long were oblivious.

We must summarily conclude, if Avey’s Swap is ‘true’ as Gilbert asserts, we are obliged to revise the history, documents and memoirs of E 715 & KZ Monowitz! Alternatively, we must conclude The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz is a falsification of history! It sadly exposes enormous gaps in Gilbert’s knowledge, and lack of interest in researching this history. Gilbert’s pretensions made him a ready dupe. This was already evident in his grossly misleading portrait of Coward in The Righteous. Gilbert’s indifference and negligence not only undermines the integrity of his subject, but it also effectively endorses Historical Revisionism, pleasing to Holocaust Deniers.

Gilbert wasn’t bothered, judging by his view of Holocaust Denial in 2005: “The number of deniers and the amount of denial literature is minuscule compared with the serious literature, not only the memoirs but the history books, the specialist books, and books which cater for every age group on the Holocaust… in that sense the Holocaust deniers have totally lost out.” Gilbert’s comment five years after Deborah Lipstadt’s successful defense of Libel by the infamous denier David Irving, is possibly unique amongst historians of his caliber and renown. 

Gilbert was certainly at odds with the most qualified sceptics of Avey’s book. Amongst them, Dr Setkiewicz deserves the greatest criticism given the ‘forensics’ were at his fingertips.

_{DENIS’ SISTER WINIFRED: AVEY’S FLIGHT OF FANCY & GLOSS OVER FAMILY TRAGEDY}

Avey’s Testimonial Schisms are underpinned by a family tragedy that he never recorded. Though he repeatedly mentioned his older sister Winifred, he initially wove a fantasy around her. In IWM he recalled she was part of ‘Amy Johnson’s crowd’, the Women’s Air Transport Auxiliary, ‘ferrying planes from America’. In fact, ATA only ferried from the factories to aerodromes in the UK, and Winifred’s name is not in ATA lists (‘not even as a tea lady’) as confirmed by ATA historian and archivist. Richard Poad.

Avey’s flight of fancy was contrasted by a conspicuous silence following repatriation. WEG records Winifred’s tragic death four months after father & son were repatriated. Winifred was an employee in a local dress shop in Epping since 1932. She was hospitalized with Pulmonary TB at the end of June ’45 and died on 24 September. She was 32 years old and engaged to be married. The funeral with parents and brother in attendance, along with Winifred’s fiancé, Arthur Jamieson, who wrote a small poem In Memoriam, which was printed the following two anniversaries.

Denis’ failure to record his sister’s death from TB, might illuminate the reason for his own false hospitalization with Systemic TB ‘immediately’ he was repatriated. More disconcerting, George returned suffering from ‘Chronic Bronchitis’, which raises a question, whether he infected his daughter.

Winifred’s death allied to Mrs. Avey at the end of ’47, summarily means that George & Denis were bereft of their two closest female kin within 30 months of repatriation. In addition to being deeply painful, it may have also felt ironic given all that father & son had suffered and survived during the war, as well as leaving life-long scars.

FRIEDLANDER’S GEORGE MEDAL AND SIMONS ‘WOODEN BOWLS’:  JEWISH CHRONICLE PROTECTION OF HET & GILBERT ENDORSEMENT OF AVEY’S HOLOCAUST HOAX: ‘A CONSPIRACY TO DEFRAUD’ (Carolyn Yeager)

JC Editor Simons failure to respond to the Friedlander-Avey submission has its roots in 2021 when he was Deputy Editor and addressed questions regarding his own interview with Avey & Gilbert for an article in The Times, Feb 2010. It led Simons to an enthusiastic request: ‘If you would like to write a story for us debunking Avey that would be fantastic.’ Six months later, receiving the revelation of Avey’s father, Simons with Assistant Editor, Orlando Redice, replied, ‘we intend to do this story. Am passing all this to a senior investigative reporter who will be in touch shortly.’ Three days later, ‘I’m afraid that after some discussion we’ve come to the conclusion that given the amount of time and energy this will require and given that Avey’s story has been at least partially discredited already, we feel it’s not worth taking this on.’  

The adage that one can’t be partially pregnant is reflected in the book sales: ‘250,000’ in the UK circa Avey’s death, now probably in excess of a million worldwide. Simons & Co evidently failed to grasp the significance of Avey’s denial of his father in ‘Summer 1944’, whitewashing the primary ‘Witness’ to his Swap story, and the full implications for Avey’s family history.

JC’s dim wittedness was accentuated by HET’s outburst suppressed for a decade. Only one had broken ranks a few months after Avey’s death, Honorary Patron, Kitty Hart Moxon, a survivor of Auschwitz, branded Avey ‘a total fraud’.

The ‘dissociation’ began in 2012, following the ‘controversies’, when HET surreptitiously deleted Avey & book from its website. In 2013, HET commissioned ‘a Holocaust Expert’, Dr Russell Wallis, to investigate Avey’s claims. Wallis published his findings in British POWs and the Holocaust: Witnessing Nazi Atrocities (2017). Alas, Wallis whitewashed his paymasters & Gilbert from association with Avey; and essentially confirmed the critiques of 2011, implicitly rejecting Gilbert’s Foreword. Wallis also swallowed Avey’s lies of no POW records & Liberation Q, resulting in his earliest source for Avey’s testimonies the self-confessed “gabbling” of an old man in IWM 2001. Wallis’ limitations were compounded by his scholarly failure, noted by his only astute critic, Jean-Michel Turcotte: ‘the archives and materials used by Wallis are limited to Great Britain, and consequently, important studies and relevant concepts published in other languages are absent. In particular, German, Swiss, and Red Cross archives contain many documents that would have been central to this study.’ Thus, errors abound in Wallis’ analysis of Avey’s POW history, (e.g. Asserting Avey got his POW wrong, when it was the British scribes); compounded by Wallis’ failure to discover a number of files within his domain at TNA. It all pointed to Wallis’ critical faculties which led him to assert Avey ‘denied’ football was played in E715! It summarily suggested no one at HET listened to IWM interview or read Avey’s book. Still, HET lauded Wallis in a book talk at the Wiener Holocaust Library!! 

The real development was HET’s unpublicized vow on 24 March 2022, in response to the new revelation: ‘The Holocaust Educational Trust’s name will be removed from the e-Book and from further publications of the book. We consider the matter closed.’ On the contrary, HET opened up a schism with the publisher. For how could HET conceive ‘further publications’, with ‘amendments and contextual notes of queries and doubts to Avey’s account’ by the two ‘Charlatans & Magicians (conjurers of illusions)’, and still propped up by the deceased Gilbert’s Foreword? HET has failed to respond for over two years. The publishers’ parent company, Hachette, only responded to the branding of ‘H&S’s ironically titled publisher of non-fiction, Rupert Lancaster’ as ‘ignorant, corrupt and immoral,’ with a threat of ‘legal action’. It met with the enthusiastic reply: ‘Please do, as you won’t survive a Process of Disclosure in a court of law.’

The concern was accentuated by the Ministry of Defence, in response to the complaint that this is not just a private family matter, but the falsification of the military and POW history of one member of the British Armed Forces by another. MOD was requested to hold ‘A Military Tribunal’, declaring its ‘provenance of the German POW records’, thus reinstate George Avey in the history of E715, and issue a severe posthumous reprimand to his son. MOD acknowledged ‘the Observer article’ but following internal inquires, MOD absurdly requested ‘further media attention’. MOD clearly got its priority wrong; and who can get more ‘media attention’ than MOD? 

In vain, the Observer was requested to resolve the dichotomy of its own making, by failing to confront Avey co-authors and publishers for a comment on the German records, that the paper inexplicably also failed to print. The Observer asserted the journalistic protocols, whereby a denial of the historical document, provenance MOD and available at TNA, was deemed valid, rather than casting aspersion on the entire collection of German records ‘for some 200,000 individuals.’ 

Thus, requested to pick up where the Observer left off, JC Editor did not respond. It led to a more explicit correspondence, noting Simons’ interest to ‘debunk Avey’ would not have been necessary, if he had done the job a year prior to the book. That dubious honour went to HD Yeager and another blogger (who goes under the pseudonym Further Glory; his website is Scrapbookspages blog) in March 2010, shortly after ‘Simons’ article in the prestigious Times‘ was featured in their critiques. 

The most prominent concern in Avey’s picture of KZ Monowitz:  ‘… everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.’  The former blogger mused: ‘Avey has apparently never even been to the Museum exhibits at Auschwitz, which display the enamel covered metal bowls used in all the camps.  He has apparently never even seen Schindler’s List, or he would know that Schindler was making a fortune by manufacturing enameled metal bowls for the Germans.’  

Yeager: ‘Only enamel covered metal bowls were used at all the camps. So Avey reveals he’s making it up when he specifies wooden bowls.^’  

Six weeks later, LA Times unwittingly reported ‘metal bowls’. This miraculous alchemical transmutation was amplified in the book, ‘the crash of metal’, demonstrating that Avey had become Broomby’s ventriloquist dummy. 

The appendage to Simons: ‘the obvious question, why you failed to make such valid observations as the Holocaust Denier? The obvious answer is that you didn’t have a clue. In other words, you did not have the rudimentary knowledge to interview anyone who was or claimed to have been in a Concentration Camp, let alone Auschwitz. This issue is now even more acute since you became Deputy Editor and then Editor of the Jewish Chronicle.’ It more acutely reflected on Gilbert’s failure to spot Avey’s mutation in the manuscript. 

Yeager kept abreast of events, and conceived the book, ‘the product of a conspiracy to defraud’_. Walters’ article was celebrated under the subhead, ‘The jig is up’_, with the reminder to her audience, ‘I did a pretty thorough job of debunking Avey’s poorly concocted story.’ Freshly noting, ‘Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish journalist Henry Kamm endorsed Avey’s book with unqualified admiration… and Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert wrote the Forward, calling it “a most important book.” A serious problem here… these people are intelligent enough to see that Avey’s story is false on its face…. 

‘The British Holocaust Education Trust should also be concerned about the fakery they have promoted, but they are too deep into it and have no one else at whom they can point the finger. Passing off the blame is always necessary, a form of ‘plausible denial’. The same goes for the BBC and the Labour Party and government of Gordon Brown – they were too anxious to force this story into the public consciousness for their own political gain without regard for its obvious falsity. But when have those benefiting from the holocaust been concerned with truthfulness? Rob Broomby is guilty of personally accepting and seeking to profit from this hoax, along with Patrick Howse (BBC producer). The book’s publishers had a great deal to gain but now have a great deal to lose. They will do all they can to blunt the criticism. This is why the criticism must continue and become ever more widely sourced… as well as louder and more demanding.  

‘To show that even the guilty cannot help but speak the truth at times, it’s utterly appropriate that Broomby reported that Avey is fond of saying to Howse and himself, “It’s you two who opened this can of worms.” How very apt. A can of worms indeed is what it is.’  

Sunday Times labelled it ‘a vipers’ nest’, but ‘fear of libel’ prevented a full expose of the ‘Interface’, which demonstrated the aptitude of Avey’s co-authors, ‘solutions are devised as problems arise’, in Yeager’s words, whose comments of 2011 also proved prophetic and all the more compromising for HET after its Patron’s branding, ‘a total fraud._’

More than a decade later, and two years after HET’s public & private statement, Avey’s dangerous and subversive, ‘fraudulent’ and mislabeled ‘memoir’ continues to thrive in the commercial and academic sectors with HET and Gilbert’s endorsement in numerous versions globally, while HET and the publishers seem to be locked in a Dance Macabre, in fear of their own reputations and sizeable commercial investment on the part of the publisher. It summarily seems like a protection racket. Alas, Bernard Friedlander wartime heroism is a devastating casualty of the UK politics of a Holocaust Hoax. 

 

• Alon Shapira is an historical researcher and writer, born in Israel and living in London.

NOTES

[1] Peres Brothers Myth was first recorded by Gershon Peres in Eric Silver’s The Book of the Just (1992). (Gershon further numbered ‘700-800’ Jewish escapees). Shimon Peres repeated the myth in his memoir Battling for Peace (1995). Silver selectively used Perski’s 3p Hebrew Testimony in Coward’s YV file 109. Silver ignored Perski’s commendation of an anonymous survivor of Auschwitz from ‘Ramat Gan’ who could testify to Coward’s ruse. It was evidently Albert Huzyt who provided a 25-p testimony, but crucially stated of Coward’s ‘activities, which were mentioned in the newspapers, I do not know anything.’ Silver’s book was only in Gilbert’s Bibliography, Peres’ book in his script. Gilbert compounded his ignorance of Hebrew with his ignorance of the 1947 IG Farben Trial documents: He noted in Coward’s YV file: ‘Norbert Wollheim testified at the Nuremberg Trials’ that due to Coward’s ruse ‘at least four hundred Jews had been able to get away.’ The source was ‘Letter from Anne Rose to the ambassador of Israel, London, 21 March 1961.’ Aside misspelling ‘Ross’, (who was a naval intelligence officer at Bletchley Park), Gilbert failed to note, Ross’s source was the BBC programme ‘This Is Your Life’, where Wollheim was one of Coward’s guests.  A surviving transcript reveals Wollheim didn’t mention Coward’s ruse, which conveys Ross heard what she wanted to hear. More importantly, Wollheim’s Nuremberg affidavit & court testimony do not mention it either. In sum, Gilbert used unreliable secondary sources, flaunting his ignorance of Hebrew & IG Farben Trial documents. He symbiotically failed to research the history of E715. The USHMM scholar Dr Joseph Robert White did undertake a significant research of E715 but was hampered by lack of documentation, which he erroneously believed would provide evidence of Persky in Auschwitz. Shimon Peres’ delusion that his father was identified in Coward’s book, The Password is Courage, as the character ‘Clatterbridge’, a demonstrably fictional persona in an entirely transparent fiction that ‘cannot stand an historical acid test’ in the words of Norbert Wollheim in a 1990 letter to UK film documentary filmmaker, Maurice Hatton, with whom Dr White also corresponded. Dr White extremely limited research of Coward’s YV file, including the English language documents, led him to overlook Coward & Persky’s escape from Tost. This episode is covered in Chapter 7 of The Password is Courage, dated to Summer 1942, and Persky is evidently the character called ‘Pilski the Pole’. The date matches Coward’s dating of the escape from Tost in ‘August 1942’ recorded in his Liberation Questionnaire. Coward noted his escape partner, ‘Cpl. Connolley’. William Connolley’s Lib Q corroborates the escape with ‘SM C. Coward & Cpl Persky’ [TNA, WO 344/75/1 & WO 344/70] 

[2] Walters privately confessed: ‘Yes, we should have looked at the IWM archive before the piece was published, but the exigencies our deadline [sic] meant that we lacked the time. Furthermore, we had expected that the IWM notes would have included such a singular story, and we mistakenly relied on them.’ Walters’ priority to hurriedly publish was further reflected in the one valid criticism of the Rebuttal, that no one interviewed for the article had read the book! The list included Dr Setkiewicz & Mr Rosensaft, along with Professor Ken Waltzer, Ernst Lobethal’s daughter Ingrid Lobet, E715 veteran Brian Bishop, and Auschwitz survivor Sam Pivnik. Only the latter two have since confirmed they read it, and their reaction was polar opposite. Bishop recorded in Ron Jones’ biography that Broomby ‘sent me a copy and it was just as I thought. When I read it, it made me laugh….’ Pivnik turned tale, initially being told the Swap took place in ‘Birkenau’, on reading, ‘in Buna, which is a camp I had no knowledge of.’Pivnik was quoted in 2^nd ed ‘Notes on Sources’. Pivnik had just been offered his own book deal by none other than Avey-Broomby publisher Rupert Lancaster. The mystifying part of it that Pivnik’s lit agent was Andrew Lownie, who contacted the Sunday Times to expose the Walters-Avey Double Bluff, the IWM Swap story and Gilbert’s Foreword to the book.  Brian Bishop’s comments in the current article are drawn from fellow E715 veteran Ron Jones’ biography, The Auschwitz Goalkeeper (2013), see note 7 below]

[3] Author correspondence with Dr Setkiewicz, Dr Black, and Mr Rosensaft. Details omitted, principally because the correspondence with Dr Setkiewicz would require extensive coverage. 

[4] Avey couldn’t keep abreast of the revision, and numerous examples in national and local papers of his regression to the Ernst-centric story. It had another variation, Ernst the enabler of Avey’s swap with a Dutch Jew. Simons Times article was the principal source: ‘Avey’s audacious plan was made possible by Ernst Lobethall…. He also used the cigarettes as bribes to help Avey to gain entrance to the Jewish camp.’ – Yeager questioned: ‘How so? Lobethal says nothing about Ginger trading places with a Jewish prisoner in his testimony; he only spoke of getting cigarettes. It’s Avey who’s filled in all the rest.’ It further conveyed that neither Simons nor Gilbert could be bothered to take stock of the BBC documentary, let alone Lobethal’s SF video. In sum, from Nov 2009 till the publication in March 2011, Avey was simultaneously telling two versions with variations. No one in the media was ‘connecting the dots’ in Yeager’s words. Following publication, Avey continuously regressed to the Ernst-centric story in the media and public talks, most notably recorded in the journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees which hosted one of Avey’s many talks.

[5] Broomby-Long revision of what Avey purportedly ‘said’ in the IWM interview is enshrined in Avey-Broomby 2^nd ed ‘Notes on Sources’ [p. 271-2] with some revisionism of ST Interface. 

[6] TNA file FO 950/5089

[7] Arthur Dodd, Spectator In Hell (1998 republished numerous times till 2017, with two changes of title); Doug Bond, Allies in Auschwitz (2009); Ron Jones, The Auschwitz Goalkeeper (2013). It would require extensive coverage to trace various connections. Most notably, Dodd was a rabid fantasist like Avey, who mimicked Dodd’s fictional self-portrait as ‘a troublesome prisoner, sent to Auschwitz as a punishment in March ’43.’ However, Dodd did not include his fictions in his IOM claim, only the erroneous date ‘March ‘43’. Like Avey, Dodd completed a 1945 Lib Q where he recorded his true history. Dodd’s biographer Colin Rushton was as much a Charlatan as Broomby & Long, who were heavily influenced and plagiarised quite a lot from Dodd-Rushton’s false accounts of E715, which also infected the other two books.  

[8] It was the first mass transfer from Italy to the Reich, crucially before the Armistice. 2400 POWs were chosen for their profession to work in German industries. They were transported in 5 trains, July 19 – 22.TNA holds a fascinating file on this episode, WO 916/692.    E715 Transfer List 700+ names is stored in the Archive of the Russian State Federation, GARF, Moscow. This precious list is invaluable, because ICRC records generally only record the main Stalags, not the Work camps. They are otherwise recorded in the Personalkartes.

[9] Avey claimed E715 South African Dr William Oliver Harrison treated his eye on the day of the incident. Unbeknown to Avey, Dr Harrison kept a Daily Diary and did not record treating Avey for any condition. The diary is not a Treatment list, but major injuries as this one were recorded. A copy of the diary was obtained by the present author from Dr Harrison’s son, Richard in 2021,

[10] Michelle Owen, Archives Officer, Archives & Local History, Manchester Central Library, St. Peter’s Square Manchester M2 5PD], 4 April 2023. Further NHS research would be prohibitively expensive. However, NHS Manchester suggests that Avey’s hospital records were possibly ‘destroyed’. Baguley Sanitorium records are comprehensive for the period investigated, but do not go beyond 1949. Carolyn Yeager would be delighted to know that following an Appeal to TNA/ MOD, Avey’s Military Records were recently declassified a decade early, but with a redaction on his medical records. However, the redaction covers 1954-56, the end of his period on Reserves. He was Discharged with ‘50% Disability Pension’. It suggests the hospitalization occurred in this latter period. A further Appeal to Information Commissioners Office has been logged. The Appeal argues that Avey forfeited his Confidentiality by his ‘false’ IOM Claim and commercial exploitation of his fabrications in a ‘best-selling memoir’.

[11] TNA WO 311/1112. ‘Ill-treatment of British prisoners of war (Working Party E715) on a forced march between Auschwitz, Poland, and Prague, Czechoslovakia, January to February 1945.’ The file was recorded in Little’s 2009 publication, and Little’s book is noted in Broomby-Long ‘Notes on Sources’. Diarmuid Jeffreys published his 2004-05 interviews with Avey in Hell’s Cartel (2008). Jeffreys records: ‘Avey and other POWs were approached by Morris Amchan, one of the US Prosecution Team via the War Office in London. The depositions and affidavits can all be seen in the Record Group 238 T 301 section of the US National Archives’. It’s not been easy to research this file and Jeffreys failed to respond to correspondence via his publishers for over a decade. It suspiciously suggests that Jeffreys embellished the NARA document to include Avey, notably given Jeffreys comment: ‘Mentally and physically shattered, he moved to Manchester after a few days and checked himself into a hospital.’ [Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel p. 289]’, which conveys Jeffreys simply took Avey at his word. Avey lent credence to the suspicion, as in his memoir he revised the dating of his hospitalization by nine months, and re. prosecutors, asserted, ‘No one managed to track me down…’

[12] Hero or hoax? See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/01/hero-or-hoax-theman-who-broke-into-auschwitz-or-maybe-didnt. Avey, Denis Gge (Oral history) and Interview with Denis George Avey | Imperial War Museums. NB: Concerns have been raised over the historical accuracy of certain aspects of this interview, in particular those parts of the testimony concerning Auschwitz. Particular caution and background research is therefore advised. Further information is available in a Supplementary file (128)

[13] Stan Newens, The History of North Weald Bassett and its People (1985) Arthur Stanley Newens, a renowned politician, was not a native, but a resident of NWB for many decades. His fascinating book includes quite a lot of details on the Avey paternal family, with a number of photos. The area is renowned for various contemporaneous reasons. Sir Winston Churchill was the MP for Epping 1924-45. North Weald Bassett was one of the first aerodromes in the UK which operated in both World Wars.  In the IWM interview, Denis Avey stated he considered joining the RAF, adding,‘Oddly enough I wanted to fly, as my sister did. My sister flew. She got her license.’ It may well be true given the aerodrome. However, the author has yet to verify this particular comment, rather Denis’ later one, that his sister enlisted in the Women’s Air Transport Auxiliary, disproved by ATA records, as noted in the penultimate section of the article.