Strummer, Deli

Adele “Deli” Strummer (née Aufrichtig, 2 May 1922 – 25 July 2016) was an Austrian Jewess who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, then a while later for eight days to Auschwitz, from where she was sent to a labor-subcamp of the Flossenbürg Camp. Toward the end of the war, she was evacuated to the Mauthausen Camp, where she was liberated by U.S. troops. She eventually emigrated to the U.S., where she had a successful career as a gynecologist.

Starting in 1980, she toured as a speaker telling her story as a “survivor.” In 1988, she self-published a book titled A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust. When an extended version of it was to be turned into a movie in the late 1990s, scholars noticed differences between the script and the book. After some digging, they revealed a series of untruths Strummer had been telling her audiences for years:

• As the year of her deportation to Theresienstadt she gave 1941, rather than 1943.
• She claimed to have been in Auschwitz for nine months, when in fact she was there only for eight days.
• She claimed to have been at the Bergen-Belsen Camp, which was completely false.
• She claimed that she entered a homicidal gas chamber five times, but came out alive, because the guards “turned on the water instead of the gas.” She probably took real showers and converted them later, as a dramatic effect for her audiences, into attempts at gassing her.
• On 5 May 1945, the day the Mauthausen Camp was liberated, she was allegedly lined up with other inmates to be gassed. She was walking toward the gas chamber doors as the American knights in shining armor rode into the camp rescuing her. The problem is that the SS had left the camps two days earlier, and that the camp was self-governed by inmates when U.S. troops arrived. Moreover, if we take the orthodox narrative for granted, homicidal gassing supposedly stopped in late 1944 on Himmler’s order, or so Kurt Becher claimed in a perjurious affidavit after the war. However, there is no physical trace of any homicidal gas chamber ever having existed at that Mauthausen Camp. The facility presented as such was a real shower room.
• She claimed her husband died in the Holocaust, when in fact he survived, and she divorced him in 1947. In fact, he was still alive while she was touring the country.

Adele Strummer had no children and never remarried. After her medical career ended, her way out of loneliness and lack of purpose was by finding a new passion: creating a large crowd of admiring followers – her new family – by manipulating gullible audiences with her passionate yet mendacious speeches. Unsuspecting school children were her preferred targets, as she explained:

“Children really listen to me, they cling to me. I have over 200,000 children.”

Substitute children. However, after falling from grace, she lost them all. Ironically, her maiden name – Aufrichtig – is German for “sincere,” “candid.”

(For more, see Copeland 2000; Vice 2014a&b.)