Australia is still reckoning with a shameful legacy: the resettlement of suspected war criminals after WWII
It turned out Hunka had fought against the Allies as a voluntary member of the Nazi German Waffen-SS Galizien division.
- 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.