A history of Australia’s Nazi hunters reveals a troubling tolerance for war criminals
- Written by Kristy Campion, Senior Lecturer in Terrorism Studies, Charles Sturt University
Neo-Nazis marching through Australian streets, black-clad and masked, have become a common sight in recent years. Over a century since the rise of fascism – Nazism is the German school of fascist ideology – perhaps we have forgotten or become complacent about what this actually means.
Review: Nazis in Australia: The Special Investigations Unit, 1987-1994 – compiled by Graham Blewitt & edited by Mark Aarons (Schwartz)
In the cold mud of Serniki, Ukraine, the bullet-riddled skeleton of a mother shelters her 12-year-old daughter even in death; the tattered remnants of a baby jacket are all that remain of her second child.
In Liepaja, Latvia, a young girl watches as her family is beaten with rifle butts and her father is loaded, bleeding, into the back of a truck, never to be seen again.
In Ćemaluša, now in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a communist is tortured in a prison, hung upside down from a door and beaten.
A Latvian SS officer participates in the gassing of 30,000 Jews, partisans and other victims at mobile gassing installations near Minsk.
A Croatian Nazi officer leads a roving death squad near Sarajevo that holds peremptory “hearings” before torturing and executing countless civilians: men, women and children.
What these historical crimes have in common is one thing: the Nazi perpetrators fled to Australia after the war. As Mark Aarons and Graham Blewitt demonstrate in Nazis in Australia: The Special Investigations Unit, 1987-1994, such stories are the tip of a formidable iceberg.
Around 27,000 Australians gave their lives in the fight against fascism during the second world war. Many of those veterans who returned and who carried wounds, seen and unseen, all their lives, now lie in Australian graveyards, along with the very men they fought against.
Quest for justice
Nazis in Australia is a timely contribution to the public discourse. Its beginnings can be traced to the 1980s, when Aarons, a diligent journalist, started investigating Nazi collaborators and war criminals who had taken refuge in Australia.
Aarons turned his investigations into a Radio National series, which in turn sparked government action. The Menzies Review, undertaken in 1986, led to an initial sweep of some 70 cases of suspected Nazi war criminals in Australia.
In 1987, with the support of prime minister Bob Hawke, Bob Greenwood QC established the Special Investigations Unit to conduct investigations into suspected war criminals. It had around 80 staff, from all walks of life.
Nazis in Australia describes the vast efforts – and also the sadness – of those who worked in the Special Investigations Unit. Blewitt, the former director of the unit, has collected memories from his colleagues, gathering statements from lawyers, historians, researchers, archaeologists, translators, consultants and police investigators.
These contributors recall their engagement with the Special Investigations Unit and their determined quest to bring perpetrators to justice. The personalities of each of the volume’s contributors – some quiet, some boisterous, all committed – rise up from the pages.
The book details the international pilgrimages in search of decades-old evidence. Investigators met with Ukrainian peasants, Croatian judges and top Kremlin officials. They heard testimonies in numerous languages, and interviewed victims’ families, witnesses, co-offenders and alleged perpetrators. They examined original SS documentation in Germany. As one police investigator recalled:
What struck me was the brutal efficiency evident in the Nazis’ creation of this documentation. Being surrounded by such calculated racial and soul-destroying history, you could virtually hear the SS jackboots stomping up and down the corridors.
Archaeologist Richard Wright tells us of excavating 553 bodies from the mass grave in Serniki, mostly women and children. His colleague Sonia lays flowers on the site. Translator Ludmila Stern recalls the long, strenuous days, and the “distressing nature of the subject matter”, interpreting traumatic recollections across numerous languages and cultures.
Historian Konrad Kwiet, writes of his disillusionment with the Australian legal system, his expert evidence on the stand being reduced to yes-no answers. Even now, many years later, Australian Federal Police officer John Jansen writes, “it is almost daily that I reflect on what witnesses had recounted detailing the horrors that the victims of the Holocaust went through”.
The investigators also had to disentangle webs of lies spun by war criminals, many of whom had assumed false identities and concocted fake alibis. Some had layers of protection that had to be peeled back, including one individual who was a known Nazi but was recruited as a paid ASIO agent.
Doing the right thing
The Special Investigations Unit did not fly blind. It met with and learned from similar teams in Germany, Israel, Canada and the United States, including the “Nazi hunters” in the Office of Special Investigations.
During its tenure, the unit examined 841 cases. Four were referred for prosecution, with three going to trial. In 27 cases, there was adequate substance to the allegations but insufficient evidence for referral to prosecutors.
Another 262 cases ended because the suspects were dead or likely to be dead, and 105 cases were suspended because the suspects were overseas, charged overseas, or the allegations proved false. In 191 cases, the claims could not be substantiated. In the remaining cases, the suspects were “not located in Australia”.
The work of the Special Investigations Unit was cut short. In 1994, prime minister Paul Keating “insisted on closing down the SIU”, before the most serious offender under investigation could be charged. Nazis in Australia details the withdrawal of support, confronting the allegations that the unit was a waste of resources and did not secure enough convictions.
Aarons and Blewitt establish that the Special Investigations Unit represented a line in the sand. It demonstrated a commitment to addressing the crimes of the past and sent a clear message to war criminals that they would not find safe haven in Australia.
“Australians should be proud that, for a brief period in our legal history, we stood up and did the right thing,” writes Blewitt.
Triumphs and failures
It seems almost a cliché to say this book is a useful contribution to the knowledge of our past and the troubling tolerance of war criminals in our midst. It has become something of an open secret that Nazis were permitted to migrate to Australia. They were seen as a better option than communists.
Blewitt and Aarons have given us an unflinching history, beautifully written and devastating to read. Their book documents the challenges of navigating an ever-changing political environment and the complicated bureaucratic and legal obstacles to justice. Its contributors confront the reader, not cautiously but honestly, with the content of their work and what it meant to them.
In detailing the Special Investigations Unit’s triumphs and failures, Nazis in Australia never loses sight of its true purpose. The team of professionals who sought to change Australia brought some dignity to the victims. They identified graves so the bodies could be exhumed with care, and attempted to bring the genocidal killers to justice.
In humanising the victims of unfathomable violence, the authors provide a rare insight into lived history, without the distance so common in more academic works.
Nazis in Australia is also a lamentable account of the normalisation and tolerance of war criminals and the destructive malevolence of Nazi ideology. Its shocking accounts of atrocities committed against unarmed men, women and children are an urgent reminder of the dangers of complacency and indifference.
Authors: Kristy Campion, Senior Lecturer in Terrorism Studies, Charles Sturt University 
