WHEN Allied forces made their famous declaration in October 1943 that they would hunt down and hold to account all Nazi war criminals, they vowed no corner of the world would be remote enough to hide in.

But many Nazis weren’t even forced to hide in notorious hideaways such as Argentina and Brazil. They found their homes in London, New York, Sydney and Melbourne, to name just a few. The very countries that had sacrificed their soldiers to defeat the Nazis’ tyranny sheltered Nazi war criminals with an averted gaze.

Mark Aarons is one of Australia’s pre-eminent authorities on Nazi war criminals whose 1986 radio documentary, Nazis in Australia, prompted the Hawke Government to launch an inquiry which led to the establishment of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) in 1988.

He is also the author of Sanctuary! Nazi Fugitives in Australia (1989) and War Criminals Welcome (2001), both of which explore Australia’s history as a safe haven for Nazi criminals.

“ These were people who fought vigorously against our troops, who fought against all the principles we stood for, and along the way committed some of the most heinous crimes against humanity in history,” he says.

“Justice, as well as morality, dictates that there should be no lapse of time capable of erasing their crimes or erasing the responsibility of authorities to bring action against them.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, whose mission is to track down Nazi war criminals and bring them to trial, has identified 485 war criminals who settled in Australia. It has written to the Federal Government regarding each of these cases, but so far Australia has never extradited a single suspected war criminal — despite the SIU’s five-year, $15-million operation.

According to Aarons, “Federal governments from day one of the Nazi scandal in Australia have been dragging their feet. From 1947 when the first Nazis arrived here, all the way through to the present, they have wanted this issue to go away... they don’t care if the epitaph that’s written on the Third Reich is that the last Nazi died peacefully in his bed in Australia.”

In many cases, that has already happened. It’s now 60 years since the Holocaust ended and the opportunities for Australian governments to help bring Nazi war criminals to justice are quickly expiring.

But right now, Federal Justice Minister Chris Ellison has on his desk a request from the Hungarian Government to extradite a man alleged to have bashed a young Jew to death at the end of World War II.

Perth resident Charles Zentai, 83, is accused of the vigilante-style murder of an 18-year-old Jew, Peter Balasz, in Budapest in 1944. Two others were convicted for their part in the murder after the end of the war, but Zentai escaped to Australia where he has lived ever since.

“The government’s obligations are absolutely crystal clear, both in international law, Australian law, and in morality,” Aarons says. “They must investigate the allegation, establish whether or not there is evidence to support the claim and, if there is, take the most appropriate form of legal sanction, whether it be putting [Zentai] in front of an Australian court or extraditing him. The easiest but minimum option is to deport him.

“We need to send a message around the world that Australia is not an easy cop, we’re not a land that, when we discover mass murderers living amongst us, shrugs its shoulders and says, ‘Oh well, that happened a long time ago, let’s turn our backs on those tragic events and get on with our lives and allow mass murderers to get on with theirs”, Aarons says.

“I think we need to send a message that every single murderer who settles here is going to be hounded and is going to be subject to the most stringent investigation and legal processes, otherwise they’re going to keep flocking here.

“Australia, because it is the only western nation which has refused repeatedly to take any organised ongoing sanction against these people, has turned itself into something of a safe haven for people from all civil and military conflicts who commit crimes against humanity. They see Australia as an easy place to settle down in, where you can safely avoid major legal repercussions for your actions.”

Aarons says postwar Australian governments knowingly accepted Nazi war criminals into the country. “The very first ship that brought displaced persons under the displaced persons scheme contained a significant number of people from the Baltic countries who, it was revealed, had fought or served in the SS. The then security service investigated and the file eventually made its way onto the immigration minister’s desk, Arthur Calwell, who shut the whole thing down and told them to stop investigating and that it was an immigration issue, not a security matter.

“That really set the tone,” he says, “the first minister, the first ship, the first Nazis, and he turned a blind eye, knowing that the consequences, and I don’t think there can be any doubt about this, would be a significant movement of ex-Nazis and Nazi collaborators into Australia.

“By comparison, the rules that applied for Jewish refugees were extremely harsh... The number of Jews arriving on any ship was restricted to quite a small percentage of the total passenger list, which meant you couldn’t get large-scale Jewish migration. It meant in many instances that Jewish refugees actually found themselves on the same ships as their former persecutors. There were many people who actually identified an SS guard or a Nazi official who had been responsible in their region for carrying out the Holocaust on the same ship.”

IT is now widely known that British and United States intelligence services actively recruited former Nazis to aide their anti-communist operations. Aarons says some of these recruits were subsequently handed on to Australian authorities and settled here.

“You can trace their war crimes, you can trace their recruitment by US intelligence, you can trace their illegal immigration into Australia, and then you can trace it all the way through to them going onto the payroll of ASIO once they arrived in Australia... The purpose being that they would help ASIO in anti-communist operations, both in the domestic hunt for communist agents, but also in the procurement of international intelligence — particularly of intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain. These people had a range of family and political contacts still living under communism and were thereby seen to be quite capable gatherers of intelligence.”

Australia has welcomed other war criminals to its shores, even since the last World War II criminals arrived, Aarons claims. He says similar black marks on the immigration record occurred throughout the 1980s and 1990s when former Afghan communists were recruited by Australian intelligence agencies and brought into the country.

In the 1970s Khmer Rouge members were allowed in and even now there are calls for the Federal Government to investigate claims Rwandan Hutus who participated in the Tutsi genocide of the 1990’s have settled in Australia.

“The parallels and the way in which history continues to repeat itself are very, very stark,” Aarons says. “[There is] official indifference at senior government levels, [and] active recruitment and use of war criminals by our security services.”

Aarons says, regardless of the fact Zentai is alleged to have committed his crime 61 years ago, it is the government’s unequivocal obligation to fully investigate and act on any allegations it receives.

“It’s a question of adopting a principled stand that where allegations of a serious crime are leveled against an Australian resident or citizen, no matter how ancient they may be, that proper processes are put in place to deal with them. It’s a simple matter of justice. There’s a claim of a crime and you can’t just let it somehow fade into the distance.”

Australian Jewish News, May 27, 2005