Donald Joseph Watt (10 August 1918 – 28 May 2000) was an Australian Army soldier and the author of a literary hoax, a fictitious Holocaust memoir entitled Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster.
Only the disclosure of Watt's fabrications altered the status of the book which was initially praised by various Jewish organizations as the most important work written in Australia.
Reportedly, the fraud enabled Watt to receive monetary compensation from the Australian government as a Holocaust victim.
[1] A number of institutions unknowingly associated themselves with the forgery partly because it was published with the financial help from the popular Jewish-Australian benefactor John Saunders.
[2][3] Watt latterly lived in Tweed Heads, New South Wales,[4] where he died on 28 May 2000, at the age of 81.