Donald Joseph Watt (10 August 1918 – 28 May 2000) was an

Australian Army The Australian Army is the principal Army, land warfare force of Australia, a part of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) along with the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force. The Army is commanded by the Chief of Army (Austral ...

soldier and the author of a

literary hoax Literary forgery (also known as literary mystification, literary fraud or literary hoax) is writing, such as a manuscript or a literary work, which is either deliberately misattributed to a historical or invented author, or is a purported memoir ...

, a fictitious

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

memoir entitled ''Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau'', published in 1995 by

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publ ...

. Only the disclosure of Watt's fabrications altered the status of the book which was initially praised by various

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

organizations as the most important work written in Australia. Watt was born in Mildura, Victoria, Australia in August 1918. In the book, Watt described being sent to

Auschwitz concentration camp Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

by the Nazis soon after he was recaptured trying to escape from a German POW camp. He claimed to have been forced to work as ''

Sonderkommando ''Sonderkommandos'' (, ''special unit'') were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber vict ...

'' in the crematorium attached to the gas chambers. Reportedly, the fraud enabled Watt to receive monetary compensation from the Australian government as a Holocaust victim. A number of institutions unknowingly associated themselves with the forgery partly because it was published with the financial help from the popular Jewish-Australian benefactor John Saunders. The memoir was discredited by historical experts from

Yad Vashem Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...

, the Auschwitz Museum, the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...

and, most importantly, by Professor

Konrad Kwiet Konrad Kwiet (born 1941) is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is currently Pratt Foundation Professor at the University of Sydney and Resident Historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum. He has worked in universities, museums and research ...

, historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum and the former chief historian of the Australian War Crimes Commission. Watt latterly lived in Tweed Heads, New South Wales, where he died on 28 May 2000, at the age of 81.

Bibliography

* Donald Watt, ''Stoker : the story of an Australian soldier who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau'', 1995, English, Illustrated edition. Other Authors: Mazal Holocaust Collection. Published: East Roseville, N.S.W. : Simon & Schuster.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Watt, Donald Joseph 1918 births 2000 deaths 20th-century Australian male writers Australian Army personnel of World War II Hoaxers Literary forgeries

Bibliography

See also

References