I was reading about a notorious faker, Marie-Sophie Hingst, who pretended to have 22 Jewish relatives that died in Birkenau.
A funny plot twist ensued when I read about the man who uncovered her deceit:
Ende Mai 2019 deckte der Journalist Martin Doerry, dessen jüdische Großmutter Lilli Jahn im KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau ermordet wurde, im Spiegel nach Recherchen eines Teams um die Historikerin Gabriele Bergner auf, dass die auf Hingsts Blog veröffentlichten Erzählungen über ihre – angeblich jüdische – Familie und deren 22 Holocaust-Opfer nicht der Wahrheit entsprachen.
This Martin Doerry, who exposed this Hingst claim of 22 relatives murdered in Auschwitz... claims to have had a Jewish relative (Grandmother), Lilli Jahn, who was murdered in Auschwitz! So naturally he is a moral authority. I thought to myself: if Hingst is fake, why not Doerry? So I looked up Lilly Jahn on Wiki to see what the official narrative is.
German wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilli_Jah ... _Ermordung) has the most elaborate version of this woman's disappearance:
Im März 1944 wurde Lilli Jahn mit einem Sammeltransport über Dresden nach Auschwitz deportiert. Vorher gelang es ihr noch, die Briefe ihrer Kinder aus Breitenau hinauszuschmuggeln: Sie gelangten in die Hände ihres Sohnes, der sie ohne Wissen seiner Schwestern bis zu seinem Tod 1998 aufbewahrte. Der letzte erhaltene Brief Lilli Jahns aus Auschwitz vom 6. März 1944 ist von fremder Hand geschrieben, nur die Unterschrift ist die ihre. Im September 1944 erhielten die Kinder in Immenhausen die Nachricht vom Tod ihrer Mutter.
In summary, she was deported to Auschwitz in March 1944, and only in September 1944 did her family learn of her death (from another source, and on her Stolperstein outside Bismarckstraße 29, Köln, it says "murdered, ca. June 1944").
A few curious points:
She survived March, April, May, and part of June in "Auschwitz", so she was not gassed on arrival. What did she die of, then?
She wrote her "last letter" from Auschwitz (!), showing that the SS allowed correspondence from inside a death camp (???).
Her "last letter" was not written by her ("ist von fremder Hand geschrieben"), but the signature is hers ("die Unterschrift ist die ihre").
Her death was made known to her children 3-4 months after it occurred, by September 1944, in Immenhausen, a town 400 miles west of Auschwitz in the very middle of Germany. Why would the Camp inform the family of her death, unless it was a natural one?
All of these points lead me to think she was not murdered, as her lying grandson and fake Stolperstein claim.