Hungarians

• It turned out Hunka had fought against the Allies as a voluntary member of the Nazi German Waffen-SS Galizien division.
• As I discuss in my new book, Fascists in Exile, Canada isn’t the only country where former Nazis fled after the second world war.

• Last year, however, his secret history was revealed: he was found to be a member of Nazi intelligence in occupied Lithuania during the second world war.
• He was almost certainly involved in the persecution and murders of Jews.

Denial, then investigations

• This group included soldiers who had fought in German military units, as well as civilian collaborators.
• But their resettlement in any country that would take them was a matter of political expediency in the fraught post-war and early Cold War period.

• The then immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, dismissed their claims as a “farrago of nonsense”.
• The migrants were used as labourers under a two-year indentured labour scheme and transformed into what the government called “New Australians”.
• Australia received at least eight extradition requests between 1950 and the mid-1960s for individuals suspected of WWII-era crimes from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
• As a result, there would be no further official discussions about any alleged perpetrators residing in Australia.

Family histories unearthed

• Many alleged perpetrators of crimes never appeared on any official, or unofficial, list, either before or after the Australian investigation.
• My own research, for example, has resulted in the compiling of hundreds of such names by painstakingly piecing together various archival fragments.
• For example, a colleague and I were alerted to some suspicious phrasing when the family of Hungarian migrant Ferenc Molnar, now deceased, placed a commemorative biography on the website Immigration Place Australia.
• The SBS television show Every Family Has a Secret has been approached by at least four people who have suspected a deceased family member was a Holocaust perpetrator or collaborator.

Dr Jayne Persian receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

• The authors from Smoke Free Sweden (smokefreesweden.org) will launch their Saving Lives Like Sweden analysis in a public meeting in Warsaw today.
• The Smoke Free Sweden movement’s latest report illustrates the potentially tremendous impact on lives across WHO member states if the Swedish model is applied on a larger scale.
• The report, Saving Lives Like Sweden, will be unveiled on the eve of the Global Forum on Nicotine.
• “If policymakers here in Hungary had adopted Sweden's harm reduction strategies in 2000, 251,000 lives could have been saved.