Australia has rarely exposed its guilty secrets. One such secret was the safe haven given to Nazi fugitives after the Second World War. Until Mark Aarons revealed this travesty in an ABC radio documentary the guilty lived quietly with their Nazi secrets. How and why fascists and Nazi collaborators were allowed to migrate to and settle in Australia along with the thousands of European refugees, in the immediate post-war years is a consequence of our post war need to ally ourselves with the CIA and MI5 to continue to be part of the international Anti communist cold war . By 1948, the governments of the United States of America and Great Britain secretly agreed to end their efforts to bring the practitioners of Nazi terror to justice. Both Chifley and Menzies knew they must be part of the international community by developing ways of escape for these war criminals became part of Cold War’s real politik. Through the intelligence channels of the U.S.A and Britain, Klaus Barbie, Mengele and other prominent Nazi torturers were found new identities in South America. Scores of lesser known Nazi collaborators and fascists became new citizens of the United States, England, Canada, South Africa and Australia. The secret political police in Australia, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (AS.I.O.), possessed an abundance of archival evidence of these fugitives’ war-time activities. AS.I.O. knew that they had imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands in the name of fascism. Many influential Ministers in successive Menzies governments were also privy to these guilty secrets yet like AS.I.O. they chose to use such information to their political advantage. Mark Aarons carefully documented the wartime “careers” of Ljenko Urbancic, Laszlo Megay and Jaroslav Stetskio and other Nazi collaborators. The barbarities for which they could be held responsible were painstakingly examined. Their collective guilt cannot be dismissed as propaganda. Too little attention is given to the longstanding complicity between A.S.I.O., and leading Liberal Ministers from Holt to Greenwood to deploy these servants of Nazism as ethnic community leaders in their domestic war against communism. The phalanx of “Captive nations” organisations which arose in the early 1950′s were largely under the captive leadership of former Nazis who owed their “respectability” to the silence of AS.I.O. and “understanding” anti-Communist politicians and senior public servants. The extent of such complicity, even duplicity, can be gauged by the open military training undertaken by the Croatian fascist front, the Ustashi near Wodonga in 1963. Not only did the Ustashi members have the use of Citizens Military Forces armoured cars but also sported Army issue Owen Machine Carbine. Their political leaders, Srecko Rover and Ljenko Urbancic found support at the highest levels of government to carry out such training displays. It is perhaps doubly ironic if not perverse that with the political malaise and fragmentation from which former Yugoslavia suffers. The other weakness concerns the failure to examine the relationship between the Nazi “ethnic leaders”, AS.I.O., the National Civic Council and the Democratic Labor Party. It is simplistic to assume that BA. Santamaria and the DLP leadership knew nothing of these ethnic leaders’ war activities. Their fervent anti-communism and anti-semitism may have been welcomed by the clerico-fascists. How could Santamaria with his strong connections with AS.I.O. not be aware of the Nazi leadership of “Captive Nations”? Moreover, Aarons tells us nothing about the way these war criminals exercised their influence over their compatriots in the trade unions. For example, it would be of some historical importance to know what pressure these Nazis were able to exert over migrant workers in the Federated Ironworkers’ Association to maintain the long career of its leading right-wing official, Laurie Short. The unhealed wounds of Europe under fascism and the secrecy of Australian anti-communism remain today. Should the atrocities of a fascist past be brought to bear against their aged perpetrators in the present? How is social justice advanced? How is the memory of the Nazi genocide kept alive? These are vital social issues which cannot be ignored. If all must be forgotten nothing can be forgiven. Critics of the present war crimes legislation have complained of the vast expenses involved in such proceedings; the violation of the accused’s civil liberties; the unreliable nature of former Soviet and other communist evidence; and its specific application to Central and Eastern Europe. Such present day underlying political ambiguity and unspoken agendas, would never have come to pass had A.S.I.O., anti-communist politicians and their bureaucratic minions denied amnesty to fleeing Nazis. Menzies introduced the Flags act in 1953 to remove the popular use of the peoples flag the Red Ensign, to get the red out of our flag and replace it with The present flag to immediately claim the Blue ensign as the Liberal Party symbol. See: diggerhistory.info/pages-flags/red_ensign.htm Australia is, as John Pilger reminds us, “a secret country”. An unspoken guilt still governs its refusal to recognise Aboriginal land rights and self-determination. A similar guilt pervades the complicity to shelter Nazi criminals. Until these and other guilty secrets are justly addressed we remain a grotesque unworthy place of moral torment and decay. Is the cleansing liberation of truth about our past, recent and distant, such an unwelcome confrontation? Have we the Courage to face up to this?
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 12:14:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015