Centenarian denies singing at Nazi death camp
Dutch-born singer and actor Johannes Heesters, 104, began a lawsuit yesterday in a bid to force author and documentary film maker Volker Kuhn to withdraw claims that he sang for guards at Dachau in 1941.
Mr Heesters, who rose to fame in Germany in the Third Reich, says he was ordered by the Nazis to attend the camp in an attempt to deceive the public about what was really going on inside.
But the entertainer, thought to be the world's oldest performing actor, denied ever singing at the camp outside Munich.
"It never happened," Mr Heesters said in a lengthy statement explaining his connections to Nazi-era Germany on his website.
Mr Kuhn maintains that Mr Heesters was there to perform for the troops, basing the assertion on a 1990 interview he did with former Dachau inmate Viktor Matejka, a political prisoner who went on to become Vienna's Councillor for Cultural Affairs after the war.
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Mr Heesters, who rose to fame in Germany in the Third Reich, says he was ordered by the Nazis to attend the camp in an attempt to deceive the public about what was really going on inside.
But the entertainer, thought to be the world's oldest performing actor, denied ever singing at the camp outside Munich.
"It never happened," Mr Heesters said in a lengthy statement explaining his connections to Nazi-era Germany on his website.
Mr Kuhn maintains that Mr Heesters was there to perform for the troops, basing the assertion on a 1990 interview he did with former Dachau inmate Viktor Matejka, a political prisoner who went on to become Vienna's Councillor for Cultural Affairs after the war.