Liberal viral news outlet NowThis News pushed the bizarre claim that Holocaust victim Anne Frank did not “die [from] a concentration camp.”
In a Tuesday tweet, NowThis posted video of members of the far-left Jewish Voice For Peace criticizing President Donald Trump‘s executive order combating anti-Semitism and comparing Trump’s handling of the border crisis to the Holocaust. “We’re seeing people die at the border from lack of medical care,” said Becca Lewis, a senior at George Washington University. “That’s how Anne Frank died. She didn’t die in a concentration camp, she died of typhus.”
As phrased, Lewis’s claim that Frank didn’t die “in” a concentration camp is simply false; witnesses say the famous diarist and her sister Margot died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen death camp. The subtitles provided by NowThis changed Lewis’s claim to say that Frank did not die “[from] a concentration camp.”
But the altered claim is also rejected by Holocaust historians, who draw no distinction between the victims actively murdered by gas chambers or firing squad and those who died from disease. The Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that typhus victims died of “deliberate neglect” as part of “the German policy to cause the deaths of large numbers of Jews through over-crowded, squalid living conditions and a lack of reasonable medical care.”
Earlier tonight, The Rachel @maddow Show reached out to me for comment in advance of the Lev Parnas interview. Rachel read my response on-air. See below for request and response. pic.twitter.com/l7eLyjMUzV
