Australia: haven for Nazis
There is outrage at alleged Latvian Nazi mass murderer Konrad Kalejs' most recent safe return to Australia. In recent years, Kalejs — who arrived in Australia in 1950 and became an Australian citizen in 1957 — has been deported from the US, Canada and now Britain when it became known that he had commanded a death squad responsible for the slaughter of 30,000 Jews, Communists, Roms (Gypsies) and people with mental disabilities.
Despite damning new evidence emerging — such as a photo showing Kalejs wearing a Nazi SS uniform in 1942, excerpts from a propaganda sheet written by a Konrad Kalejs boasting of killing civilians, and Kalejs' admission on SBS radio that he was indeed a leader of the dreaded Arajs Kommando death squad — it seems unlikely that Canberra or the Latvian government will move against Kalejs.
Newspaper editorials and commentators have criticised the Coalition government for its "mishandling" of war crimes prosecutions, especially the Kalejs case.
Of course, Kalejs and all other known Nazi war criminals in Australia should be investigated and, if possible, prosecuted (the respected Simon Wiesenthal Centre estimated in 1998 that there could be as many as 400 suspected Nazi criminals living in Australia, 64 from Latvia alone). Should Latvia request Kalejs' extradition, the government should immediately send him there to stand trial.
Yet the real crime scandal is being ignored by the capitalist media: how on Earth did Australia become a haven for Nazi war criminals in the first place? The preoccupation with one evil man deliberately diverts attention from more than 50 years of bipartisan government policy to settle and shield Nazis in Australia.
After 1945, British, US and Australian officials illegally laundered thousands of Nazis through the screening system. By 1948, all but a handful of Nazi collaborators had, in effect, been amnestied. The Cold War had begun and yesterday's Nazis were today's "anticommunists".
Between 1948 and 1951, 180,000 "displaced persons" resettled in Australia, the vast majority genuine refugees. Reports from the Commonwealth Investigation Service (ASIO's predecessor), that former Nazi collaborators were among them, were rejected by Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell as a "farrago of nonsense".
The Robert Menzies Liberal government, elected in December 1949, was also not prepared to reveal former Nazis. Instead, ASIO recruited "anticommunists" to spy on left-wing migrants and the left. In cooperation with US and other Western intelligence agencies, ASIO recruited former Nazis to infiltrate their now Communist-run homelands.
While ASIO obsessively investigated any migrant possessing even a hint of left-wing sympathies — some were refused citizenship until 1972 — former Nazi collaborators were granted citizenship with few qualms.
Emboldened, Nazi and far-right formations openly organised within migrant communities and were welcomed into the Liberal Party. By the late 1970s, far-right migrant groups led by ex-Nazis controlled up to 30% of the votes at the 800-member NSW Liberal Party's state council.
The Bob Hawke Labor government continued the cover-up. A 1986 government report on Nazi war criminals in Australia falsely claimed that German scientists brought here after the war had no Nazi links. The Special Investigation Unit, formed in 1987, was not allowed to investigate them.
Labor closed down the SIU in 1992, before it could obtain a single conviction. In 1995, the Australian Federal Police refused to prosecute a colleague of Kalejs, Karlis Ozols, because the investigation would be "too expensive". Labor did not overrule the decision.
The reluctance of both conservative and Labor governments to pursue Nazi war criminals in Australia is not the result of bungling. They know that a trial may reveal how successive Australian governments considered Nazi mass murderers their brothers-in-arms in the crusade against communism, national liberation fighters and the labour movement.
It is high time the truth was made public and those Australian politicians and officials responsible for the presence of Nazi killers in this country identified.