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Anzac and Auschwitz: Theunbelievable story of DonaldWattKonrad Kwiet aa Professor of German, and deputy director ofthe Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies ,Macquarie University , SydneyPublished online: 28 May 2010.

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KONRAD KWIET

Anzac and Auschwitz: The UnbelievableStory of Donald Watt

Donald Watt, Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier Who SurvivedAuschwitz-Birkenau. East Roseville: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 173pp.

More than fifty years after Auschwitz the Holocaust has become a self-servicefacility from which academics and journalists, educationalists and politicians,artists and filmmakers, and many others can select at random whatever suitsthem. In this competitive market the only products which can be sold at aprofit are those offering new revelations, promising provocative theses, andthose which are also easily accessible. Effective market strategies are also re-quired to increase and satisfy consumer demand. This trend has assumed inter-national dimensions. The current Goldhagen debate is illustrative. Centred asit is on Germany's 'eliminationist antisemitism' and 'Hitler's willing execu-tioners', it has attracted considerable attention in Australia—where, not longago, it was Helen Demidenko-Darville who caused a sensation when her anti-semitic pamphlet, The Hand That Signed the Paper, was honoured with thehighest literary award. That controversy, it seems, is fading, only to be super-seded by a new, unbelievable story: Donald Watt's Stoker: The Story of an Aus-tralian Soldier Who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau. Comparisons are inevitable.

Demidenko's 'novel' revitalized the powerful historical myth of the 'Jew-ish-Bolshevist conspiracy' in order to explain and to justify the 'revenge', thebrutalities and bestialities unleashed by Nazi collaborators in the Ukraineagainst the Jews. The murder of the Jews remained unpunished. The youngAustralian writer of British extraction saw no purpose in bringing perpetra-tors to justice, among them members of her 'invented' Ukrainian family whohad found refuge in Australia. She chose rather to mount a stinging attack onthe Australian Nazi war crimes investigations and trials.

Donald Watt's 'memoir' is of a different nature. Written by a war vet-eran, it depicts horrors of the Holocaust which are not based on personalexperience, but rather taken from other sources or even invented. The 'recol-lections' culminate in the author's claim to have been a stoker in Auschwitz-Birkenau engaged in the burning of the bodies of murdered Jews. In Watt'sautobiographical account historical myths also receive new impetus. An at-tempt is made, I believe for the first time, to forge a link between the Anzac

PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE, vol. 31 , no. 4 , 1997/0031-322X/53-60SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi)

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54 The Unbelievable Story of Donald Watt

legend and the reality of the Holocaust. This is heralded by the graphic designon the book's cover. It sports a photo of the author as a young, congeniallooking man in the uniform of the Anzacs, his hat worn in typical 'Aussie'fashion. This photo is superimposed on a black-and-white drawing of thebarbed-wire fences and the watchtower of a Nazi concentration camp. Theimage of the ordinary Australian incarcerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau is a clearone. Remarkable are the following lines on the back cover: 'Don Watt's nar-rative embodies the man himself: modest, straightforward, understated, cou-rageous and laconic. In spite of the horrors he witnessed and those in whichhe was forced to participate, Watt remains a hero in the tradition of the trueAustralian Digger.'

The unbelievable stoker story begins as an ordinary POW story, the au-thenticity of which' is not being disputed here. Born in Mildura in August1918, Watt enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces in January 1940, as anunmarried man, without any stated religious affiliation and as a labourer byprofession. Three months later he set out from Melbourne, his journey lead-ing him to various theatres of war: Palestine, Egypt and Greece. The success-ful Nazi invasion of Crete put an abrupt end to his career as a combat soldier.In early June 1941 he was captured and transported to Germany, togetherwith thousands of other defeated servicemen from England, Australia andNew Zealand. Donald Watt spent almost four years behind barbed wire, firstin Stalag XIII C, a POW camp located close to the northern Bavarian city ofHammelburg, and later in Stalag 357. As the records reveal, Stalag 357 wasoriginally a satellite camp located two miles from Stalag XXA near the city ofThorn in Nazi-occupied Poland. In 1944 it was presumably relocated in theface of the Russian advance since, by then, Stalag 357 was situated at Oerbke,a small village near the northern German city of Fallingbostel.

Stalag XIII C and Stalag 357, both places of military detention, are re-corded on Watt's official Service and Casualty Form kept by the AustralianArmy, Southern Command.1 It obviously took some time before the GermanWehrmacht notified the Australian authorities of his whereabouts. On 3 De-cember 1941 the following report was received from the Casualty Section:'Previously reported missing in action now officially confirmed Prisoner ofWar. Place of detention. Stalag XIII C On 3 July 1944 the message arrived:'Now interned Stalag 357.' There is no entry in the record which indicates atransfer to a concentration camp administered by the SS. Donald Watt wasliberated from Stalag 357 in April 1945 and returned to Australia in July ofthat year. He was formally discharged from the army in September. Then, atthe age of twenty-seven, he set about establishing a new, secure existence. Inhis words this meant 'getting married, settling down and getting a job' (139).

More than forty years were to pass before Watt saw fit to break hissilence. The timing of this was far from arbitrary. In 1987 the Hawke gov-

1 Now housed at the Australian Archives, Victorian Office: Series B 883, Item VX 8006.

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KONRAD KWIET 5 5

ernment, against the background of the emerging Nazi war crimes debate,agreed to compensate veterans who had been 'illegally interned in a Nazi con-centration camp' and 'subjected to brutal treatment'. Encouraged by his wifeJoan, Watt lodged an application for compensation. A Concentration CampsCommittee, established to examine each case, needed some time to decide inDonald Watt's favour. This was due to the lack of evidence in his militaryrecords. However his medical records pointed to symptoms consistent withsuffering as a result of harsh treatment. His files compiled by the Concentra-tion Camps Committee do not contain a historical reference confirming theincarceration in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1990 Watt received a non-taxablelump sum of $A10,000, a compensation to which, in my opinion, he was fullyentitled.

This official recognition of his ordeal presumably provided him withthe stimulus to reveal the full story in public. A first version appeared in 1991:a booklet of some fifty pages entitled 'I Was There Too'. It was printed at hisown expense and had a circulation of 500. The news of the 'story of an Aus-tralian POW sent to Auschwitz for trying to escape'—as the booklet was sub-titled—spread quickly. Journalists and other interested persons lost little timein approaching Watt. Inspired by these contacts and the discussions they ledto, Donald Watt continued his writing, and the sheer act of doing so appearsto have unleashed a certain creativity in his remembering of the past. Watthimself described the phenomenon this way: 'the more I wrote, the more Istarted to remember' (169). He alluded to having the same experience follow-ing interviews: 'More memories came back after that interview, and I wassoon remembering enough for a third draft to be written' (169). After thethird, a fourth draft followed, submitted to and accepted for publication bythe renowned Simon and Schuster publishing house.

Whatever exact form this long and creative process of recollection andrecording may have taken, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the au-thor, step by step, manoeuvred himself into the role of the 'hero' and, in do-ing so, recalled events and deeds which he came to perceive as historical truths.It is undeniable that he had a number of helpers in the piecing together of hisstory. In my view these helpers played a not insignificant part in facilitatingand even encouraging the adoption of this role. The result is a construction offact and fiction. As far as the sections dealing with the Holocaust are con-cerned—and it is they alone which concern me here—they are not based onWatt's personal experiences but rather on other sources and contain numer-ous inaccuracies. Even certain linguistic formulations provide evidence of theinauthenticity of his so-called eye-witness accounts. The language employeddeviates from expressions used or images presented by survivors who experi-enced the horrors of the Holocaust. The following are examples selected fromthe extensive list of historical fabrications.

In early summer 1941, upon his arrival in Germany, Watt recalls thestopover of a deportation train loaded with women and children at the rail-way station of Hammelburg:

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56 The Unbelievable Story of Donald Watt

We knew they were Jewish, because they were wearing a Yellow Star of David ontheir clothes and in some cases had the word Jude stitched on them as well. Theywere taken off the train and were so filthy it seemed they had not been able to washor shower for days. They certainly had not been fed. The guards threw loaves ofbread to them, and they literally fought each other to get a piece. Shocking to watch,there was almost a stampede to get to the bread, and many women and childrenwere trampled underfoot and crushed to death. We had never, in the whole of ourlives, seen anything like it. We would only stand there, powerless to put a stop tothe appalling scene we were witnessing (56-7).

In fact, such a horrific scene never took place in Hammelburg. None of thehistorical records contains a reference to this spectacular, public crushing ofwomen and children. Donald Watt appears to be the lone witness to that event.Furthermore in the summer of 1941 German Jews were as yet not stigmatizedby yellow badges nor had the process of systematic deportation started. Itwas only in the autumn of 1941 that the last avenues for emigration werefinally sealed and the first transport shipments were sent eastward to the sitesof organized mass murder. Ostracized by German society, the Jews were nowforced to wear the yellow star and wait until they were assigned their place onthe deportation list. When they embarked on their final journey, as a rule inthird-class passenger wagons, they did not look like the passengers portrayedby Watt—filthy, emaciated, fighting for bread.

Horrific scenes did occur, however, at other places, particularly in theNazi-occupied territories of eastern Europe. German civilian authorities com-plained repeatedly about 'unpleasant incidents' which disturbed the other-wise smooth running of the deportations officially termed 'Eisenbahn-judentransporte' (transports of Jews by rail). The journeys often lasted sev-eral days. Herded together in hermetically sealed cattle wagons, the victimswere exposed to extremes of heat or cold, of hunger and thirst, and the mostappalling sanitary conditions. Many perished en route to Auschwitz and otherdeath camps. Numerous Jews attempted to escape. At regular intervals bod-ies were found at the side of railway tracks: the bodies of Jews who had beenshot by train guards while attempting to escape or who had been fatally in-jured while jumping from the moving trains.

Escape attempts by Allied prisoners of war incurred draconian sanc-tions. Donald Watt claims to have escaped from Stalag 357 in Thorn in thespring of 1944 and marched through central Europe, only to be recaptured atthe German-Swiss border. His arrest was followed by lengthy interrogationsand torture. He alleges that in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg his transfer toAuschwitz-Birkenau was ordered. However it seems more than unlikely thatan escaped and recaptured Australian POW would have been sent to this par-ticular camp.

Allied prisoners of war remained, as a rule, under the jurisdiction of theWehrmacht. The principle of military and international law applied even toJews serving in the British or American, French or Dutch, Canadian or Aus-tralian armed forces. Kept in separate compounds they survived the Nazi pro-

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gramme of the 'final solution'. The German military refused to hand JewishPOWS from western countries over to the SS, concerned that their murder couldendanger the lives of German soldiers and civilians interned by the westernpowers. No such consideration was taken into account in the war of destruc-tion waged against the Soviet Union. Of 5.7 million Russian prisoners taken3.3 million perished, a death rate of 58 per cent. Two specific groups weretargeted for immediate liquidation: political 'commissars' of the Red Armyand soldiers of Jewish origin. Allied POWS were also incarcerated in concen-tration camps. A group of Australians was detained, together with prisonersfrom other western countries, in a special compound established within theperimeter of Theresienstadt. Thousands of POWS served as slave labourers,but in separate compounds of satellite camps, such as Blechhammer or thePOW labour detachment at the IG Farben Buna factory in Auschwitz-Monowitz, and not in death camps. Among them were some Australians, asmall number of whom are still fighting for compensation today. It is quitefeasible that Donald Watt, after an unsuccessful escape attempt, was lockedup in a high security military installation or transferred for disciplinary rea-sons to a concentration camp. It is just as possible that he was deployed thereas a stoker for heating installations or that, imprisoned in close proximity todeath camps, he received the news of the gassing and burning of Jews andother inmates. Since 1944 Stalag 357 was situated very close to the death campof Bergen-Belsen.

Donald Watt's alleged journey at the end of April 1944 from Nurem-berg via Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Up-per Silesia is a fabrication. The explanation given for the detour toBergen-Belsen is grotesque. In 1991 Watt wrote:

We travelled [by train] with a lot of stops till midday when over came our planesagain and wrecked this lot of rail lines. The guard got another motor vehicle butbecause our planes were bombing the roads also we were not able to continue toAuschwitz. Instead the guard took me to Belsen. My stay here was to be until theroads were safe (48).

The updated, stylistically refined version of 1995 reads as follows: 'With allthe bombing that was taking place, I think [the guard] lost his nerve a littleand decided to take the easy way out, heading for what he guessed would besafe territory . . . we arrived at a camp called Belsen' (83).

In Bergen-Belsen, Watt claims, he encountered inmates 'wearing prisonshirts with yellow triangles' (85). Jews incarcerated in the so-called 'Sternlager'of Bergen-Belsen were indeed marked with yellow stars most of which hadthe Dutch inscription 'Jood' (Jew). However, they were not dressed in blue-grey concentration camp uniforms but rather were granted, as inmates of a'transit-camp', the 'privilege' of continuing to wear their own clothes. Wattsays that he discovered huge mass graves and observed how dead bodies werethrown into the pit, layer by layer. He describes camp conditions which an-ticipated the later inferno. He is obviously drawing on the images which were,

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58 The Unbelievable Story of Donald Watt

after the liberation in April 1945, disseminated worldwide through the pressand which resulted in the name Bergen-Belsen becoming a metaphor for or-ganized mass murder.

In Bergen-Belsen Watt was exposed to another sensory experience, onewhich established a link to his native Australia:

There was a smell, a strange smell that rekindled memories of my youth aroundMildura. I noticed the smell the moment we arrived at Belsen, but somehow I pushedit to the back of my mind. Then the smell was in my nostrils again, insistent, de-manding attention, a smell that caught at the back of my throat and made me wantto gag. I then recognised it for what it was. With my mind going back to the lushfields of Mildura, I remembered the times I had come across a cow or a sheep thathad strayed out of a paddock and had been hit by a car or truck. By the time I cameupon the carcass, it was usually rotting away in an advanced state of decay. Andthat's what I could smell around Belsen: the smell of death (83-84).

The 'smell of death' was the result of murder by poison gas. In 1991Watt declared: 'When I . . . went for a walk in the compound and caught aglimpse of Russians digging I then realised that this was where the bodiesfrom the gas chambers were being disposed of (48). In 1995 he maintained: 'itwas during this time [in Auschwitz] that I realised how I'd managed to escapethe gas chamber at Belsen' (89). However there were no gas chambers inBergen-Belsen. There wer' presumably also no fellow inmates who could pro-vide him with information about gas chambers operating in Auschwitz. Afterone week spent in Bergen-Belsen Watt continued his fictitious journey toAuschwitz: 'it was starting to dawn on me: I was being sent to a death camp'(87).

According to Watt's own account his papers were processed upon ar-rival in Auschwitz-Birkenau (87). There is no documentary evidence of this.Part of the bureaucratic routine was a registration process involving, in thecase of non-Jewish prisoners, the compilation of an individual camp dossier,the taking of a photo, the allocation of a prisoner's number as well as of aspecific insignia indicating the reason for imprisonment. This served to makeclear to everyone the position or 'category' of the new arrivals within theprison hierarchy. Names and numbers were also recorded on cards and listsand constantly updated, in order to administer accommodation, food supplyand labour deployment. In the extensive, though not quite complete, archiveat Auschwitz, not a single reference was found confirming the arrival andincarceration of an Australian POW named Donald Watt. There is no entry inthe 'Bunker-Buch', painstakingly kept at the time, to support his claim thathe spent two months in an infamous underground cell block.

After his release from the 'Bunker', Watt commenced his work as a stoker.Allegedly assigned to the Jewish Sonderkommandos, he witnessed and par-ticipated in the gruesome work carried out at gas chambers, mortuaries andcrematoria. Watt states categorically and repeatedly: 'I saw it, I was there' (84,171). Testimony given by a few survivors confirms a simple fact: the Jewish

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Sonderkommandos operating in Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted only of Jews.Presumably on 2 November 1944 the murders by poison gas in Auschwitz-Birkenau came to a halt. The dismantling of the killing installations began. Inthe course of the attempt to eradicate all traces of the horrific crimes commit-ted all prisoners were liquidated who could have given evidence in later trials.A few owed their survival to pure chance. Even this explanation could notapply in Donald Watt's case. He records that he was officially discharged as astoker and transported to Germany at the end of November 1944, rejoininghis Australian mates in a POW camp near Hanover, Stalag 357. In his armyrecord there is the entry: '31.4.1945 . . . Recovered POW arrived UK ex West-ern Europe'.

The unbelievable stoker story has enjoyed a remarkable reception inAustralia. Within a short period of time three editions were published, dis-tributing some 20,000 copies. Positive reviews appeared. Not one questionedthe authenticity of the Holocaust accounts. Even historians and other expertswere not struck by the inaccuracies and fabrications. Professor W. D.Rubinstein's brief review can be only regarded as an embarrassment.2 Thiseminent scholar of Jewish history praised Watt's 'autobiography' as a 'mostunusual testimony', 'one of the most important written by an Australian'. AsRubinstein goes on to explain:

Watt's very important memoirs are deeply important for many reasons. Most cen-trally, they give the absolute lie to 'Holocaust denial' propaganda, being based onthe eyewitness accounts of an ordinary Australian. To Anglo-Celtic audiences, es-pecially young people, Watt's memoirs are likely to be more relevant than those ofJewish survivors, however vivid, and will have the effect of bringing the Holocaustcloser to their own experiences.

As a 'survivor' of Auschwitz-Birkenau Donald Watt sought and foundrecognition and support among genuine Jewish Holocaust survivors. The Syd-ney-based Jewish Museum, especially its founder and patron John Saunders,encouraged and endorsed the stoker story. The Steven Spielberg Foundationhastened to record/videotape the unbelievable story as part of its monumen-tal oral history project on the Holocaust. Preparations for international lec-ture tours have already been made. The manuscript has been sent overseas. InEngland it found a publisher; the Frankfurt-based Fritz Bauer Institute, oneof Germany's documentation centres for the study of the Holocaust, was askedif it would recommend a German edition. The film rights have been sold. TheAustralian production has already commenced, presumably with the expec-tation that the Australian stoker story will equal the spectacular success ofSpielberg's Hollywood movie, Schindler's List. No less a person than BarrieKosky, one of Australia's foremost and outspoken cultural critics, has beenasked to act as co-writer for the screenplay.

2 Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, vol. 12, part 1, 1995, 159.

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60 The Unbelievable Story of Donald Watt

However Donald Watt's 'memoirs' were not universally applauded.Criticism came from abroad. Members of the research institute of the USHolocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC questioned the authentic-ity of Watt's testimonies. The Fritz Bauer Institute rejected the manuscriptfor translation into German. Yad Vashem, Israel's official documentation andresearch centre on the Holocaust, was asked for an expert opinion report.The stoker story was examined by Gideon Greif, an authority who had justpublished a work documenting the Jewish Sonderkommandos.3 He concludedthat Watt 'at no time had been a member of the Sonderkommandos inAuschwitz-Birkenau... The author describes a reality of the everyday life ofthe Sonderkommandos which never existed.' In May 1996 a negative reportarrived from the Museum of Auschwitz. Dr Franciszek Piper, director of thehistorical research department, could find no record of the imprisonment of a'British subject of Australia', let alone an Australian POW serving within theranks of the Jewish Sonderkommandos. Like Greif, Piper stressed the numer-ous errors and inaccuracies, raising serious doubts as to whether the authorreally was a witness to the events he recalls. Most recently—after some lengthydeliberations and enquiries—The Australian (29-30 March 1997) took up thestory under the heading: SHADOW OF DOUBT. Special emphasis was used topropagate the balanced view made explicit in the remarkable conclusion: 'Wattcannot prove beyond doubt that he was in Auschwitz. But neither can hischallengers prove that he was not.'

All relevant pow record collections kept at British and German archiveshave been examined. They provide no evidence in support of Donald Watt'sHolocaust story. The response of the Army Historical Branch of the BritishMinistry of Defence reads as follow: 'We have no records which would con-firm or deny his presence at Auschwitz, either in the concentration camp orof the IG Farben factory.'

In my view it is futile to debate the stoker story further, even if, as is tobe feared, antisémites and revisionists will seize the story and exploit it fortheir own purposes. Experience has shown: historical documentation anddemocratic education are not always effective strategies for putting an end totheir noisy campaigns of hatred and Holocaust 'denial'. Moreover historicalmyths are known not to disappear easily. It is one of the most important tasksof historians to counter with every means at their disposal the creation anddissemination of historical myths. If they do not fulfil this obligation or iftheir warnings are ignored, the way is paved for the ruthless manipulationand falsification of history.

KONRAD KWIET is Professor of German, and deputy director of the Centre for Com-parative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney.

3 Wir weinten tränenlos . . . Augenzeugenberichte der jüdischen Sonderkommandos (Cologne1995).

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