📺 The Six-Year-Old Jewish Boy Who Became A Nazi Mascot

Dan Goldberg - director of Hitler's Jewish Soldier - joins Jonesy & Amanda to chat about the extraordinary story of Alex Kurzem.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jersey and Amanda gam Nation.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
The life of Alex Cursm was one of the most
remarkable stories to emerge from World War Two. A Little
Jewish Boy dubbed a Nazi mascot. Tonight, Dan Goldberg's documentary
will investigate whether the story of Hitler's Jewish soldier was
in fact true or a Holocaust hoax. It's a fascinating story.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Dan, Hello, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
So tell us about the story that Alex Curzm has
told all these years.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
He maintained that he was a Jewish boy in Belarus.
Back then it was Bielarussia, and one day his mother
said tomorrow we're going to have to die. He was
a very young boy. He said he didn't want to die,
and he escaped in the middle of the night, claimed
the hill behind his little village house and watched his

(00:51):
family in his village being massacred in nineteen forty one,
and he then fled to the forest. It was freezing,
it was one of the coldest into his own record.
He survived foraging on he said, strawberries that grew around corpses,
and he had to tie himself to trees because the
wolves would eat him. Until he was eventually captured by

(01:13):
a Latvian battalion that was operating in the area, and
he was about to be executed, and according to his account,
he said to the soldier, I'm really hungry, so before
you kill me, would you mind giving me a piece
of bread? And the soldier said, you know what, We're
not going to kill you. We're going to take you
and you're going to be our child mascot, our toy soldier.

(01:37):
And he joined the battalion and they gave him a
mini uniform, pint size uniform and a sure nough rifle
and he went with the battalion.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
That was a story and said his dad about this story.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
So if that story is not incredible enough, he then survived.
The war was sort of fostered by Latviin family, who
brought him to Australia where he hid his secret for
fifty years. And yes, in twenty nine ten, about a

(02:10):
decade ago, when he revealed his story. It was a
documentary and may be seen two thousand and three. And
then there was a book written by the son in
two thousand and seven and slowly questioned started to emerge
about is this actually true? Could this child have actually survived?
And people started questioning whether it was a hoax, and

(02:31):
that's when I stumbled upon the story. There was an
expert in the Herald Sound in Melbourne, and I'd heard
about the story, but I hadn't quite landed it until
it came across my desk. And since then, which is
basically the last decade, I've been investigating whether or not
it's true and why.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
If it was a hoax, why would someone do this
just a made up story to say I was Jewish?
I wasn't, I wasn't a Nazi? Or was it to
have an interesting story to sell a book. Why would
someone do that?

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Well, there were various allegations. Yes, one of the allegations
was monetization, and there have been a raft of Holocaust
hoaxes where people have tried to monetize their story, and
as a Jewish journalist, I was hypersensitive to it, and
I confess when I first came into the story, I

(03:27):
guess I was also thinking, oh, this could be another hoax,
and that lured me into it. But as I sifted
through the sort of rubble of the story and the
rubble of his life, everywhere I turned, it was just WTF,
Oh my God, this story just gets crazier and crazier.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
Also, I would have been a bit of self preservation
as well. If that was the situation, he would have
just had to go along with him just to save
his own life.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Well, in fact, that's really a pressing point because, as
one of the contributors said in the documentary, you know
he was a child. It was a choiceless choice. I mean,
what would you arrive done based for the choice of
being killed or joining a battalion that was killing people left,
right and center.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
What a story and the story. Yeah, and I know
that his nephew wrote a book, so you've come up
against his family as well.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
I imagine his son, who's now deceieft wrote the book.
His nephew not by blood, but the Foster family, his
Latbean nephew challenged the book and claimed that the book
was full of baseless allegations and defamed his family, the
Latvian family who adopted them, by claiming that they were

(04:45):
a Nazi family, which he maintains to warn and so
there was a dossier that he compiled of all the
allegations of defamation in the book. He asked Penguin to
help the book Penguin refused, There's just been endless controversy
surrounding the story, and in the end, you know, I

(05:05):
went to Melbourne from Sydney to interview him because, you know,
such a controversial story and I wanted to hear it
from him himself. And he denied the claims from day one.
He stuck to the story. From day one. He said
he will prove everyone wrong. And then out of the blue,
after ten years of silence, he called me and he said,

(05:28):
don I've proved them wrong and I want you to
tell my story.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
And I'm sure you don't want to tell us the ending.
But is there a resolution?

Speaker 1 (05:36):
There is a not just a resolution, there is a
revelation o the end with a blistering sting in the tail.
So stay tuned to the end of the show.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
So, wow, you had me a blistering sting, Jan, it's
great to talk to you. Watch Hitler's Jewish Soldier tonight
from eight forty on SBS and SBS on demand.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Dan Goldberg, thank you, Thank you guys,