Kaiser, Magdolna

Magdolna Kaiser (née Beretka, born 20 July 1950) is a Serbian-German imposter with a long history of falsely pretending to be the descendant of some Jewish-Hungarian nobility. In 2014, she expanded her life built on pretense by claiming that she had found documents left in a Swiss bank safe by her late grandfather. That grandfather by the name of Salamon Grósz Chorin is said to have been deported to Auschwitz, where he presumably served as an inmate doctor under the direction of infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.

Kaiser contacted German-Polish historian Bogdan Musial to authenticate the documents found, among them a diary of her grandfather. 80% of the text of this diary, written inside a medical pocket calendar of 1936, was dated between 1942 and 1945. It was the grand jewel of the collection. Kaiser’s plan was to turn her grandfather’s story into a movie, hoping to become rich and famous along the way.

After thoroughly investigating the case, however, Musial concluded that everything about Kaiser’s story was phony, and that all the items “found” in the Swiss safe were forgeries. The diary, for example, contained a Polish phone number with seven digits, although such numbers were only issued after the year 2000. Some 60% of the diary’s text consist of passages plagiarized from many authors, among them Simon Wiesenthal and Imre Kertész. Furthermore, the diary’s handwriting was that of Mrs. Kaiser herself.

Wartime documents at the Auschwitz Museum moreover demonstrated that no inmate physician by the name of Salamon Grósz Chorin or anything similar was ever incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp. In fact, no document of any kind exists showing that this person ever existed. He had been freely invented by Mrs. Kaiser.

Further research showed that Mrs. Kaiser had forged a medical degree, a doctoral degree and even a nomination as a professor. She had even committed multiple financial frauds worth millions of dollars, for which she was sentenced to a 4½-year prison term in 2018.

This is a case of a subsequent-generation false witness exhibiting an astonishing degree of criminal energy. (See the entry on False Witnesses; for details, see Musial 2021, 2024.)