Here is Jewishmags take on australian nazis..
http://www.jewishmag.com/48mag/nazis/nazis.htm.
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By any international standard Australia has been largely free of the most virulent forms of Anti-Semitism. On the whole Australia's pre-war Jewish population marched to the same drummer as their non-Jewish counterparts except in the matter of religion. Post-war immigrants were too concerned with building new lives to focus on what they rightfully felt was behaviour totally outside the realm of what was appropriate and decent in a democratic society. Nonetheless, Australia has not been entirely free of neo-Nazi activity.
In 1993, the synagogue of the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation was plastered with posters and graffiti. In 1994, in Adelaide, South Australia, a community which glories in being known as the city of parks and churches, a group of twenty neo-Nazis, looking a bit like the pathetic leftovers from a racist masquerade party, goose-stepped through the city's major mall shouting "Seig Heil" and "Heil Hitler." It didn't take long for the march to turn ugly with fifteen people injured and four of the marchers arrested. Some weeks later another demonstration was held in Adelaide. A rally, sponsored by Australian National Action, to denounce proposed anti-racist legislation drew approximately 100 skinheads and neo-Nazis.
Jews played a significant role in Australian life in the twentieth century ranging from the military and the political, including medicine, the arts, academia and the sciences. One of the major Australian Football teams (a sport that can only be understood and appreciated by one with a distinctly "one-eyed" Antipodean outlook) is owned by an orthodox Jew. Generally the contributions of Jewish Australians have been disproportionate to their population. Yet one could be forgiven, when reading about many of these Australians, if one found no reference to their faith. Perhaps had Australia's Jews been more vocal in their Judaism, more vocal in demanding tighter screening of Eastern European immigrants, governments might have paid somewhat more attention to them. Even today, when in fact they are more visible and more vocal, it is largely assumed that their responses to matters are more likely to be based on their "Australian" identity than on their Jewishness.
Two recent and related events have once again brought the question of Australia as a refuge for former Nazis back into focus. The first, a series of reports by The Sydney Morning Herald in August of 1999 uncovered documents showing that scientists and technicians were brought from Germany to Australia as part of a scheme to bring in highly trained technicians. The Employment of Scientific and Technical Aliens Scheme (ESTEA) operated between 1946 and 1951, bringing in 127 German scientists of whom almost one-third were affiliated with either the Nazi Party or other Nazi groups. In addition some of the remainder had worked for the Nazis in military research or for I G Farben, the notorious chemical firm that used concentration camp inmates as workers. The second is the ongoing furore over Konrad Kalejs, an alleged war criminal, and the unwillingness of successive Australian governments to take any action in dealing with his case.
As soon as the story of the ESTEA scientists was released, Jewish groups called for an investigation. Dr Colin Rubenstein, Executive Director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) was quoted as saying,"It is a deplorable and shocking revelation that fully-paid up Nazi party members, including those who belonged to Nazi killing units, were permitted to enter Australia and start new lives, often at taxpayers' expense."
As far back as 1986, Mark Aarons, an ABC radio journalist presented a program, Nazis in Australia. He subsequently developed his research for the radio program into the book Sanctuary, published in 1989, in which he expanded and detailed his argument. In both he charged that not only had Nazi war criminals been allowed to immigrate to Australia but that many of them came with the knowledge, even the complicity, of Australian authorities. He further charged that subsequent Australian governments had refused to act to extradite Nazi war criminals, even going so far as to "muddy the waters" in terms of identifying them. In the same year as the radio program and largely as a result of it, the Labor Government of Prime Minister Robert J Hawke established an inquiry under the directorship of Andrew Menzies, QC, former deputy director of the Attorney-Generals department. Menzies conducted an investigation into the charges that Nazis had slipped into Australia as a part of the ESTEA scheme. His report appeared to clear the scheme and this, in turn, closed the door on any further investigation of those who had come in as a part of it. However, he did find that "significant numbers of Nazis had arrived in Australia and special action was needed." Following the report, the Hawke government set up a Special Investigations Unit in 1987. The SIU was charged with investigating and prosecuting any individuals in Australia who were believed to have committed crimes against humanity during World War II.
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Topic: Australian Nazis... I didn't know that... (Read 657 times)