Source : the age
Dan Goldberg was close to finishing his SBS documentary The Hunt For Australia’s Last Nazis – which he had thought was a story about “Australia’s shameful past” – when the massacre at Bondi Beach happened. Suddenly and horrifically, he says, “the present and the past collided”.
The next three or four weeks after the deadly attack in December “were a blur”, says the former editor of The Australian Jewish News as he slipped back into journalist mode, filing stories for his former paper Haaretz in Israel.
By the time he got back to his film in early January, he had to work out how to handle what he calls “the elephant in the room” – the events of December 14, 2025, when two men shot into the Chanukah by the Sea gathering at Bondi, leaving 15 people (plus one of the gunmen) dead, and another 40 injured.
“My first instinct was no, it’s a different story, it’s a different time, it’s a different place, it’s a different context, it’s too fresh, it’s too raw, it’s too confronting,” he says. “And then one of my producers said, ‘Dan, can you please explain the difference between 850 Jews massacred in Soviet-occupied Ukraine in 1942 and Jews massacred on Bondi Beach in 2025?’”
Whatever the complexities of the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the Israeli government’s response to the October 2023 terror attack by Hamas, The Hunt For Australia’s Last Nazis does a tremendous job of giving voice to the sense of vulnerability Australian Jews have long felt in this country, and the very solid reasons they have for feeling it.
Goldberg’s film is principally concerned with the fact that among the displaced persons Australia accepted from Europe after World War II, more than 4000 of them were former Nazis.
“Thousands of people who had Nazi pasts were able to come through Australia’s flimsy security screening at this time because we had an open-door policy and were more concerned about building the nation than we were about people’s histories,” says academic Ruth Balint in the film.
Our immigration policy at the time was underpinned by the dual fear of communism and the perceived threat of Asian expansionist ambitions.
“The mantra ‘populate or perish’ really became Australia’s post-war immigration agenda,” Balint says. “This was a program built not on humanitarianism but on pragmatism.”
It was also built, adds historian Jayne Persian, on blatant racism.
“Immigration officers were explicitly told not to select Jews,” she says in the documentary. “Nationalities were ranked, with Balts [people from the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia] at the top and Jews at the bottom.”
There was a profile Australia was selecting for, she adds. “They were supposed to fit in on Bondi Beach … white, young, not Jewish, anti-communist. Hitler could not have done better.”
What started as laxness laced with racism became entrenched policy when Attorney-General Sir Garfield Barwick told Parliament it was “time to close the chapter on war crimes … it is, after all, 1961”.
Australia thereby became the first country in the world to grant amnesty for war crimes, at the very same time as Adolf Eichmann was on trial in Israel for his role in the Holocaust.
It wasn’t until Bob Hawke set up the Special Investigations Unit in 1987, with a brief to look into Nazi war criminals living in Australia, that this country appeared to think there was a principle at stake in reckoning with the past. By the time it closed in 1993 (under Paul Keating), it had conducted 841 investigations, spent a truckload of money and recorded zero convictions.
Goldberg looks at three cases in some depth, of accused Nazi war criminals Konrad Kalejs, Karlis Ozols (who became Australian chess champion in 1959), and Ivan Polyukhovich, who, when arrested in 1990, still had his identification card, complete with swastika, in his possession.
Only Polyukhovich faced trial, and in July 1993, despite testimony from eyewitnesses flown out from Ukraine who identified him as having killed people, he was acquitted.
The issue was never a lack of evidence, says Goldberg. It was that too much time had elapsed for those accounts to be beyond reasonable doubt, and any conviction to be deemed safe. And it was government policy that allowed that to happen.
“We just wanted to build the country, and to hell with whether people had blood on their hands,” he says. “They were young, they were fit, they were men – and crucially, they were white men.”
Goldberg makes the point in the film that while Australia’s last Nazis have died, there are still war criminals among us from other spheres – Rwanda, Sudan, the Balkans – and they are just as likely to escape prosecution as were those who came here after World War II.
“We’re one of the few Western countries that doesn’t have a permanent war crimes unit,” he says. “This is not just the past, it is the present. We can’t allow history to repeat itself. It’s just criminal, and it’s on us.”
The Hunt For Australia’s Last Nazis is on SBS on Sunday, May 31 at 7:30pm and on SBS On Demand.
