Fake Holocaust Survivors: Henry Arnhold

Continuing on with my series of articles on the stories of so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’. We have the case of Heinrich-Hartmut (‘Henry’) Arnhold.

To quote the recent obituary of Henry Arnhold in the New York Times:

‘Heinrich-Hartmut Richard Gustav Arnhold was born on Sept. 15, 1921, in Dresden, the fourth child of Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold, whose regular salons in their spacious home were attended by famous figures in the arts and sciences, including Albert Einstein and Wassily Kandinsky.

Mr. Arnhold’s father and uncles ran Gebruder Arnhold, a bank the family founded in 1864. It served a special purpose, according to the historian Simone Lassig, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington: It lent money to industries that other, larger institutions had overlooked.

Through investments and loans, Gebruder Arnhold became one of the largest stakeholders in porcelain producers and breweries around Dresden.

In 1931 the bank bought S. Bleichroeder, a failing institution with a still-powerful name because it had provided financial backing to Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century Prussian leader who became Germany’s first chancellor. Mr. Arnhold’s family business became Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder.

Just a few years later, Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder became the first major Jewish bank to be “Aryanized,” when the Nazis forced the Arnholds to sell it to the powerful Dresdner Bank at a severely depressed price.

Life in Dresden changed as well. In July 1935, Jews were banned from public swimming pools. That meant the Arnhold children were not allowed to swim in a pool named after Georg Arnhold, Mr. Arnhold’s grandfather. That October, Mr. Arnhold’s father died of a heart attack that his family attributed to stress. Henry, as he was called since he was a boy, was 14.

The family had by then begun to prepare to leave Germany. Mr. Arnhold’s uncles had opened bank offices in Paris, London and New York. They also bought a bank in Switzerland. Mr. Arnhold’s mother engineered a request from the de Young Museum in San Francisco to exhibit her extensive collection of Meissen porcelain, allowing her to send it out of the country.

Mr. Arnhold went to boarding school in Switzerland. His immediate family — his mother, brother and three sisters — moved to the United States. Aunts, uncles and cousins landed in France and Brazil. In 1940, Mr. Arnhold was in Norway with a friend when German security officers arrested him.

He was taken to a concentration camp called Ulven, near Norway’s western coast, where, he said, 120 people were kept in two barracks surrounded by a military camp with around 2,000 German soldiers.

Mr. Arnhold wrote in a diary that a camp commander forced him and the other prisoners to sign a statement saying they understood that “we may be shot the moment we enter the death zone, marked with white stones, that trying to escape entails the death penalty and that the other prisoners will be punished with restrictions and special treatment.”

“Collective punishment is being used quite a lot,” he added.

Mr. Arnhold was let out of the camp in 1941 but told to stay in Norway. Instead, he sneaked across the border to Sweden using forged identification papers.

“It’s a wonderful feeling to get the better of the Germans just once,” he wrote.

From there, he caught a boat to Cuba, made his way to the United States and joined the Army.’ (1)

Now the problem with this narrative is two-fold in that Henry Arnhold was sent out of Germany to a boarding school in Switzerland in the mid-late 1930s and was therefore left Germany for good years before the so-called ‘Holocaust’ was even conceived of.

The second issue is that in his capture and internment by the German authorities in Norway in 1940. We note the curious anomaly in the standard ‘Holocaust’ narrative in so far as Arnhold was inexplicably released from German custody in 1941. This is despite the fact that this around the time that the war was ramping up and jews were being rounded up and sent the ghettos by the German authorities.

Indeed Arnhold is not only released but also manages to escape to Sweden as a result of this strange German policy of doing the exact opposite of what court historians like Richard Evans and Timothy Snyder claim they were doing!

How strange!

References

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/business/henry-arnhold-dead.html