Ep. 48: War Criminals in Australia with Jayne Persian

Among the flood of displaced persons that washed across Germany after WWII were a large number of perpetrators, particularly from Eastern Europe.  They mostly passed unnoticed (and unbothered) by occupation authorities to start new lives elsewhere.  A large number of these Holocaust perpetrators arrived in Australia where they not only remained unrepentant but established new fascist networks.  In this episode, I talk with Jayne Persian about these fascists in exile in Australia.

Persian, Jayne. Fascists in Exile: Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia (2023)

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Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.962)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waidman Bourne, and today we're talking about another one of the after effects of the Holocaust. We often talk on this podcast about how the Holocaust doesn't sort of stop in 1945, but has repercussions that go on after for both survivors, perpetrators, everyone else. And of course, the situation in Europe at the end in 1945 is one of

massive displacement of people. Some of whom are sort of innocent victims. Others are, we'll say less than innocent. And on today's podcast, we're looking at how some of those less than innocent folks ended up in Australia and what that situation was like and why that happened and what the sort of motivations and policies were that led to that.

And I have a great guest, Jane Pershing, on to come talk about that. And Jane, thanks so much for coming on.

Jayne Persian (01:02.84)
Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (01:04.48)
So can you start by telling us sort of how you came upon this topic, how you got into this particular issue?

Jayne Persian (01:13.558)
Yes, I can. So it's quite a strange story, really. I married into a family of Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks. So my husband's grandparents were all post-war displaced persons. And so I was doing, I think, undergraduate history at that time, really wanting to go into history.

was talking obviously to the grandparents and then looking for books about their stories. And there was nothing in Australian historiography about this massive group of people who arrived in Australia. So that led to my PhD topic, which was on the post-war displaced persons.

Waitman Beorn (01:59.938)
And so can you talk a little, before we get started with the sort of Australian element, can you give us a little bit of background on sort of the multitude of ways in which these people are, as I sort of said in the introduction, less than innocent victims? What are they doing in these various countries that they're coming from?

Jayne Persian (02:19.446)
Right, so first of all, wanted to reiterate that I'm not a Holocaust historian, really. This book comes from my work as an Australian migration historian with an interest, obviously, in the post-war displaced persons. So this is my first foray into writing anything about the Holocaust. So I have a whole chapter in the book about what these people were up to. But.

you know, again, I'm working backwards really from their time in Australia and then working backwards. So basically the massive displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, you know, up to 12 million people at one stage included war criminals, collaborators and far-right ideologues. So we're really talking about non-Jewish, Central and Eastern Europeans who were escaping from the encroaching Soviet Union. So

Bolts, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechoslovaks, Russians, Belarusians, and then also nationals of Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. So these are the main nationalities of the group that became known as displaced persons. So not looking at Germans or Austrians or anybody else, very much these Central and Eastern Europeans. So I think

We all know that the Holocaust relied on the firepower and the administrative skills of non-Germans, especially in the Eastern Territories. So in the book, in that chapter, I've tried to provide an overview of what is this huge and complicated history of collusion in the East in order to gain a sense really of who the collaborators were. And I probably found it surprising. I didn't think I'd have to write

this chapter somehow, I thought that there would be lots of summaries, but there really aren't. There's lots of nationality based summaries, but not many works that look at all of these groups together. So I've tried to simplify it, I guess, but also complicated because all perpetrators were complicit in the outcome, right, which was the Holocaust.

Jayne Persian (04:42.658)
but there were marked differences in motivation as well as individual agency. And that's important not to excuse these perpetrators, but because these are the reasons that were viewed sympathetically later on by the Western allies when they were trying to figure out what to do with them. So I guess groups that I've looked at or a bit of a main story that includes all these different groups.

such as individuals or people in paramilitary small groups before the Germans occupied, or immediately before in the wake of the Soviets leaving the East, or withdrawing, or beside German occupation. So they had their own agency, as well as involvement then with a professionally, so progressively institutionalized German genocidal machinery. So culminating, of course, in the death camps.

So what that means on the ground is that individuals volunteered or were conscripted from local populations or from Soviet prisoner of war camps. So quite different variations there. Into auxiliary police battalions assisting the four Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units sent into Soviet territory. So most of the people I look at were involved in the Holocaust by bullets in Eastern Europe.

After the Einsatzgruppen had moved through and forgive my German accent, I have no German. German authorities relied on local and auxiliary policemen to assist in combating partisans. So they were part of then, you know, the German authority structure in their particular location. They were also drafted into regular army units and sometimes later on.

after they participated in massacres and Waffen SS units, including the infamous Travnikie Guards used in Operation Reinhardt, which was the extermination of the Polish Jews. So this is very much the dirty work of the Holocaust and very much, you know, the person holding the rifle. Yeah. But we also have, which is where my interest first.

Jayne Persian (07:04.843)
was sparked independent armies like the Russian Liberation Army and Cossack units, as well as various paramilitary and irregular units who all colluded with the Germans. They could also be people in positions of authority in the administration. So a collaborationist government minister, propagandist, a mayor of a town directing ghetto clearances and mass burials. And then just to make it even more complicated.

We also see mass violence as an outcome of regional inter-ethnic conflicts and incorporated forms of non-Jewish ethnic cleansing, which is also a war crime, right? all of it's a mass of variations of experience.

Waitman Beorn (07:50.562)
Yeah, and just to put some names to these, right, for the various countries. Because I think that's, because one, mean, I think it's, I think it'd be useful for the listeners later on just to know like who we're talking about in terms of which, which are sort of the headline organizations in each of these, in each of these countries. Because one of the things that's, I think, really fascinating and seems incredibly frustrating and challenging for you to have written is that this is

Jayne Persian (07:56.054)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (08:19.71)
multinational organizations in these countries that all have their own, you know, similar, but different ways of interacting or reasons for existing and that kind of stuff. So can we just sort of put some, some match up names and countries so that later on when we talk about them, we can, you know, we're talking about.

Jayne Persian (08:43.284)
Yeah, OK. I mean, that's very difficult because all of the variations that I've mentioned all belong to different individuals who later pop up up in investigative files. So we do have a propagandist. We do have government ministers. We do. We do have all of these people. The main people who've come to light so far would be Latvian and Lithuanian battalion members and the I guess.

General case study would be someone who was a member of the police force already in Latvia or Lithuania, or a member of a far-right group who was sort of organizing little local pogroms as the Soviets were retreating and before the Germans came in, and then joined a police battalion, or became just a member of the police force under the Germans in that town. So that's sort of a general common.

story amongst the men that I've looked at who moved to Australia, who resettled in Australia. There are also many people with, from Soviet prisoner of war camps who were then sent to the death camps, including Treblinka as guards. Also, I guess the policemen, mean the police,

A policeman for me is a red flag if I say it on an immigration document because a policeman anywhere in the East was potentially a perpetrator at some time or another.

Waitman Beorn (10:26.236)
And we also have, of course, these collaboration organizations that sort of match up with countries, right? So the Latvian Legion, for example, is one for Latvia, and then the AeroCross in Hungary, the Iron Guard in Romania. See, I'm getting all these correct. The Eustachia in Croatia.

Jayne Persian (10:52.898)
Yes. But to make it even more complicated, of course, the story is so complex. So someone like the Iron Guard in Romania, I get them mixed up too. I used to have a list next to my desk when I was trying to get it straight in my head. But they were seen not as perpetrators because Hitler actually put them in a concentration camp at one stage.

Waitman Beorn (10:57.834)
Let's do it. love complicated. History is complicated.

Jayne Persian (11:19.15)
So I guess my use of that phrase far right ideologues, because some of them would have been very happy to be perpetrators, but were never given that chance. But being a member of. So it's very difficult then, of course, at you know, later on in the story, when you're looking at war crimes and what is a war crime? Because being a member of a certain political party was not at all.

a war crime under Australian law later on. It didn't mean anything. So it was actually acts of perpetration, which could, you know, unfortunately be someone who's starving to death in a Soviet prisoner of war camp who's then drafted to do guard duty, know, so-called guard duty. They don't really know what that means and end up at Treblinka. So there's such a spectrum.

Waitman Beorn (12:12.65)
Yeah. And of course then, you know, as we'll talk about the, in a weird way, these people, you know, some of them are also the, the, the OUN groups from the Ukraine, you know, are, are fortunate in a way to be imprisoned by the Nazis because then that sort of white washes, you know, their, their past and their inclinations and everything else, because they are literally at that point in a certain way of looking at it, a survivor of

of Nazi persecution, right?

Jayne Persian (12:42.956)
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that's a huge debate still, particularly in Canada amongst Ukrainian communities that the OUN was not involved in the Holocaust, which there has been just some really great recent work by historians really getting onto a micro level of figuring out what people were up to. And of course, there were the OUN was very culpable both in ethnic cleansing polls.

but also in assisting with Jewish genocide. But it really, you need to get down to that level because they have been whitewashed for decades. were, know, the whitewashing began as soon as the war ended. yeah.

Waitman Beorn (13:32.544)
Yeah, I remember as an aside, I remember I was in Lithuania at, I think I was at the Ponery Forest, which is a major killing site in Lithuania. And there was memorial there to a group of Lithuanians who had been murdered by the Nazis. But it's obviously, but there's more to it than that. It's more complicated. And they actually were perpetrators of the Holocaust.

who had collaborated with the Nazis until they decided not to collaborate with the Nazis. And then they'd been rounded up and killed. And it caused a great deal of of consternation that there's this memorial to these folks sitting on the site that is a predominantly site of Jewish suffering and murder and that kind of stuff. mean, it's just, these things are incredibly layered, right? In terms of like what people are doing and when they're doing it.

Maybe we can move a little bit forward then. Can you sort of paint the picture for what is Europe and I guess particularly Germany like in 1945 with all of these refugees and then what are the allies, I guess in this case the Western allies predominantly trying to do sort out, cetera in the immediate post-war period?

Jayne Persian (14:58.958)
Right. So we know that about 12 million DPs in 1945, including, of course, all of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. But also, as the Soviet army began going west, collaborators also fled west. So, you know, all of my guys usually fled west with the German army and under the protection of the German army.

because they knew that retribution by the Soviets and other Eastern governments would be swift and usually execution, right? And the Soviet and other Eastern governments were very, I shouldn't say good, very good at that. Justice was, you know, brought about very quickly.

So they really were fleeing for their lives and they knew that. So the allies, the Western allies, obviously America and Britain as the main Western allies initially paid lip service to this saying, yes, of course, all war criminals should be pursued and should face justice. And they were also not too bad in the very, very early days. But

There was an immediate complication because while the allies at Yalta had agreed to the Western allies had agreed to return all Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, because of course we were allies with the Soviet Union, they wouldn't return or wouldn't make people return if they hadn't been Soviet citizens before 1939. So that included all of the Bolts, the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and also the Ukrainians from pre-war Poland. So they've

always got these people that they don't know what to do with. That's at the very beginning. And then, of course, the Cold War begins, increasing distrust of the Soviet Union. And that really influenced what happened to these non-German collaborators in a huge way. The Cold War really saved their lives, I think. So for political and pragmatic reasons, Germans and Austrians were the top priority.

Jayne Persian (17:19.598)
for any sort of hunting for war criminals. There were never very good lists of non-Germans. And you can imagine why that is when so many of them were acting on their own individual agency and there were not necessarily records of what they've done. But then there's also no regular exchange of information with the Soviets and no liaison with the Soviets because of the impending sort of Cold War.

So listeners might know about the Crocass list, which is the central registry of war criminals and security suspects, which is the main war crimes list that their Western allies have. So at one point it contained 40,000 German names, but only a handful of Eastern Europeans, which is just amazing, I think. And that really continued. So.

The Allies tried to repatriate as many people as they could. They were left with about one million people who refused to return. And it was the Allied military authorities who were initially responsible for screening. This was carried out in a slipshod way by inexperienced officers. So they weren't using their best guys on this. Mostly the best guys had gone home for a bit of a rest, right? This was the end of the war. So one British official

Waitman Beorn (18:40.555)
Right.

Jayne Persian (18:45.568)
I love this quote, characterized it as a hitty missy operation. I would say more miss than hits because of course, I don't know whether it's of course, but to me it now is of course, because I've read all these documents that the allied military authorities had a lot of sympathy for these veteran soldiers, particularly when a lot of them were conscripted.

And so the British particularly actively shield various groups and particularly the bolts. So the bolts are slightly different in Eastern Europe if we're looking at a racial scale, which was still predominant even in the West in that time period. So the bolts are seen as middle-class and Protestant and they're not Slavic, right? So they're sort of the top of the tree.

And that's, you know, in Australia, it's also in Britain and in the United States. So as early as August 1945, the British Foreign Office protected about 20,000 Baltic soldiers in their care. So they're people who ended up in the British zone by not letting the Soviets know that they even had them. So they hid them basically. And then a few months later, they were all granted DP status, not as individuals, which they should have been individuals.

but en masse. So all of them were just given DP status and then the rest were filtered through to DP camps with letters from the Director General of UNRWA himself. So that's the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was running the camps. So everyone's sort of colluding in this. The British even resettled whole cohorts and it's thanks to David, historian David Cesarani that we know so much about this. In Britain,

including 8,000 Ukrainian members of the Vova and SS Galician division. And then the United States, which was initially a little bit more pro catching all the war criminals, they also just fell in line and they gave all Baltic ex combatants DP status. So that's going on. They have friends in high places. There are also lots of people and

Jayne Persian (21:09.918)
Most of the people I'd say that I've seen in the Australian documents have just lied on their documents. They've just given false names, false birth dates, false places and just said, hey, I've got no documents. What can you do? Well, there are also false documents, particularly produced by national groups. So most of the DP camps were in national groups. So you would be in a Lithuanian DP camp. And so

you then have all your sort of elite people in there working for your benefit, which included false documentation. And then when UNRWA failed to repatriate everybody, you have this one million who's left, the United Nations established the International Refugee Organisation or the IRO, which was established solely to resettle them in other places in the West. So the

recipients of the largest numbers were the United States and then Australia and then Canada and then the United Kingdom.

Waitman Beorn (22:17.184)
And so can you talk a little about the, I mean, obviously, as you rightly point out, I mean, I often talk when I'm talking to students or just the public, know, that even a conscientious investigator in 1945 probably didn't know as much about the Holocaust as an average citizen perhaps does today, just because, you know, there's just so much.

that was yet to be sort of unpacked, unpicked, researched. And that's just dealing with like the Nazis themselves, let alone all these other groups who are even more under the radar and less sort of conspicuous. So can you talk about the evolution, I suppose, of the policy relating to these people and what's going to happen to them?

Because I think it's really interesting how the allies eventually just sort of say, we're not really interested in pursuing this anymore.

Jayne Persian (23:20.364)
Yeah, that's absolutely what they say and very and quite early on. So when the IRO took over, they're very much in the time of, you know, the Cold War solidified. And basically all the GPs then had to say was that they had a valid political objection to going back to the Soviet Union. So they're now sort of refashioning their own biography as anti-communist.

And as long as they're anti-communist, then the IRA was happy. And as long as they didn't sort of come out and say, you know, hey, I was part of a police battalion that was part of these massacres, as long as they didn't say anything and they just said that they're anti-communist, then they were through, right? The IRA was supposed to scream for war criminals, but ran into the same sorts of problems.

as the military authorities and then UNRWA. So not enough information, particularly like you said about the East. It's unknown. It's unknown territory. The Soviet Union liberated those Eastern territories and they're now under Soviet Union control. So the British haven't been in there. The Americans haven't been in there. No one's been on the ground really to figure out what's going on as they did in the West.

and they're not talking to the Soviets. So there's not enough information. So the screening process is really superficial. You can imagine, I mean, I just imagine Australians, but I imagine British people and perhaps Americans are exactly the same. How do you, and I do have some great quotes about this. You know, what's the difference between a Croatian and a Latvian?

They're so different if you know, right? But they didn't know. They didn't really know the differences between different places. And then what's the difference between a Croatian and a Slovenian? They're both Yugoslav, right? So what's the difference? They didn't know. And they're also, making these emotional and impulsive decisions. So if they were interviewing people and if they seemed like a nice guy, they just let them through.

Jayne Persian (25:38.446)
And I guess war fatigue is a huge part of that as well as pragmatism, because I think it's easy for historians to look back and say, my goodness, you didn't do enough investigating. But, you know, it was very, very difficult with the amount of knowledge that they did have. So at the end of the period of the IRO, they set up a review board. So they were rejecting some people on security. You know, they were suspicious.

Waitman Beorn (26:05.378)
I mean, I I was going to say one of things that I, it's very big to go back because I came across one of these guys in my book, the book on Yanovska, a guy named Peter Blum and Peter Blum was a Hungarian ethnic German. And I actually, it's great. I I should probably send this to you, but I, I found his IOR application.

And it has all the background and he tells the story. He was a camp guard in the SS, but he tells a story about, he's fleeing hungry, et cetera. And to their credit, the investigator says that he seems suspicious and he has a scar under his arm that likely means that he removed his SS blood type tattoo. And both he and whoever the supervisor was in 47,

Jayne Persian (26:51.81)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (26:56.98)
basically agreed and we're like, yeah, this guy seems squirrely. It seems like he has voluntarily assisted the enemy forces and he, denied him. immigration. wanted to go to South America and they said, no, you can't. And, ultimately then he ends up, ends up, you know, 40 years later, 30 years later going on trial. But so they, they do, they do sometimes, you know, catch people. but as you say, you're very, very

Jayne Persian (27:20.172)
They do, but I would have given him the advice actually to keep trying because people appealed to the review board three times, four times, five times. And by the end of the IRA is only a temporary organization. So it's winding up by 1951. They want to get everyone, know, Germany can't look after these people. Germany doesn't want them. There's nowhere for them to go. They just want them resettled. Places like Australia and Canada want them.

right? They're free labor. And so really by the end of that period, they're letting anybody in. I've been very lucky to look at the IRO Review Board archives in France, and it's actually astounding how that worked. The Review Board director was disgusted, but

But that's how it happened. And again, it is just that pragmatic thing of having to get rid of these people. And so even people I found that were fighting in the post-war period, so they're fighting against Tito, late 1945, 1946, I think there was even one guy in 1947, was resettled, even though they knew that. So this is just, it's quite crazy. But I think also after Nuremberg,

with that huge effort towards German leaders, that there was just really no energy left for chasing small fry. And really most of these people are small fry. They're also the real perpetrators and the only perpetrators in a lot of cases. They're the ones who fired the bullets. But, you know, in geopolitical terms, they're small fry.

Waitman Beorn (29:16.13)
Well, one of the things that you point out, think, in the book that's really interesting, and you've touched on a little bit, are these networks of support within the DP camps where you even have the allies who are investigating these people to screen them are using interpreters who are basically DPs from that same country.

who may be just as sort of not innocent as the people that they're interpreting for and who then are basically just lying and helping these people to like, and then so these networks of support amongst these far right groups to sort of help refugees, you know, get status.

Jayne Persian (30:02.124)
Yeah, I think there's a couple of quotes about DP camps being camps for collaborators and turning into manufacturers of evidence. So this was Western officials at the time just saying they knew what was happening because they were organized to be nationality specific. They became quite famously became sites for performing nationalism. So most listeners would know that about the Jewish DP camps.

with advocacy for Israel. It also worked that way with Ukraine. So Ukrainians were not a particular nationality. They were all put in Russian camps until the Ukrainians stepped their feet and wanted a separate category and they were successful. historian Anna Hollian has looked at nationalist groupings in DP camps and she's found that they were dominated by nationalist elites and particularly the far right.

Okay, so very often these are far-right leaders from the Second World War who were complicit, even perpetrators, who were then not only advocating for people in the camp, but also in some cases bullying them because they're also civilians in these camps. So this means downplaying their images wartime collaborators and everyone has to get with a new narrative, which is

anti-Soviet freedom fighters. We're anti-communists and we love democracy. So we know that the UK and the United States used some of these DPs and particularly even far-right perpetrators as agents, field agents in the new Cold War environment. So they were sent into Eastern Europe for the US and the UK. But I think honestly,

They ruled the roost, these elites, and their main success was just in changing that narrative. And that was absolutely 100 % successful and is still, know, many people still believe that narrative.

Waitman Beorn (32:13.346)
So let's move to Australia because there's so much wrong that's going on with what Australia does. Not to excuse any other countries, Australia obviously plays an important role in World War II, but it's not one of the big countries. How does it get involved in essentially at a certain level recruiting these people to come to Australia?

Jayne Persian (32:15.576)
Mm-hmm.

Jayne Persian (32:43.694)
Yeah, so it's solely about immigration and really solely because we couldn't get British migrants in Australia in the post, you know, in the immediate post war period. We the government was interested in post war reconstruction. So no houses had been built. mean, obviously Australia was barely touched by the Second World War in comparison to Europe. But, you know, they're looking forward. And so they want.

a mass group of immigrants. They really want British or Northern Europeans, but couldn't get those people. And then realised that the DP camps were full of white people, non-Jewish white people, which is what they needed because we had a white Australia policy at that time, which meant that Jewish migration was restricted, heavily restricted. And there was pretty much no coloured migration.

whatsoever. And there had been no mass migration of non-British people so far in Australia's history. So this was actually quite radical. But it meant that the immigration minister needed to sell the DPs as migrants. they were really they were interviewed individually like they had to look like they belonged on the beaches of Bondi. They had to be able to fit in with Australia's conception of itself.

in that period, which was white and maybe even more British than the British. And of course, the preferred Baltic, again, the bolts were top of the ladder, being that, you know, middle class, fairly highly educated and Protestant. They were also the preferred anti-communist political type. So it all worked really quite well for Australia. We did send security officers to screen.

But they soon got very sidetracked with screening Jewish, potential Jewish migrants for communism because they were all communists. And so they were much more interested in that. They also quite famously could only speak English. Australia's very pro-cure in this time period could only speak English, had very little idea of European geopolitics. And so really in the end, it was

Jayne Persian (35:04.832)
Australia just said, look, the IROs, they've been screened, the IROs done it, we don't need to do it. And yeah, so they just imported them and it was a rush really to get as many migrants on the ships as they could, because they were paid for by the IRO, ships, free.

Waitman Beorn (35:21.292)
Right, okay. So how many, roughly how many people come as a result of this policy?

Jayne Persian (35:29.24)
So it's 170,000. The United States only took about 400,000. They're the largest cohort. So Australia is the second largest, which is why I argue that Australia should be much more central in DP and post-Holocaust studies, because we took so many. So 170,000 non-Jewish, Central and Eastern Europeans who had been not very well-screened.

and in some cases, protect it.

Waitman Beorn (36:00.322)
And just a question that sort of pops up because of, you know, I'm waving my hands, current events. What was the what was the relationship of sort of resident or Australian citizens to this? Was this were they supportive of this or or sort of agnostic about letting all these people in? I mean, because obviously, you know, and this is my I'm showing some of my ignorance, but, you know, Australia is in some ways.

a nation of literally of immigrants, people who were sort of deported there against their will, at least initially. But.

Jayne Persian (36:36.173)
wait a minute, it's not polite to say that to an Australian.

Waitman Beorn (36:38.486)
Sorry, I apologize to my Australian listeners. But I mean, you know, they, yes. So like it's a nation of people that are sort of dropped there at least at a certain point. But what do they think about this mass influx of people from Eastern Europe?

Jayne Persian (36:48.184)
Yes.

Jayne Persian (36:52.558)
Mm-hmm.

Jayne Persian (37:01.71)
So the Ministry for Immigration really had to sell it and that, as I said, it's about handpicking them so that they look good. And there were lots of newspaper articles about how beautiful they were, how blonde they were, their blue eyes. And of course, most DPs are young, right? They're in their 20s, young and beautiful. So it was an easy sell and actually became...

a very successful immigration program in that it then allowed migration programs from other European countries and getting progressively browner as we go into the 70s. And then, of course, Australia becomes multicultural. So it's seen from an official viewpoint as being actually it was a was a gamble and it worked really, really well. The Australian people accepted them. They were put in camps.

in regional and rural areas and had to work for two years, which probably helped. It sort of kept out of sight a little bit. But yes, mainstream, very successful. But it was known pretty much immediately who was on board because there were complaints even by IRO officials on the ships that some of these guys were Nazis. And the far left protested. So in their, you know, very far left newspapers in Australia.

So did Jewish groups straight away. So the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which is the main umbrella body for Jews in Australia, as well as something called the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, and then another group called Research Services. They actually went into the migrant camps collecting testimony against suspected Nazis. I mean, I'm calling them Nazis now, but you know what I mean.

Waitman Beorn (38:52.545)
Right, yeah.

Jayne Persian (38:55.106)
They carried out transnational investigations, so, you know, mailing the Wiener Library and Wiesenthal. They publicised suspects in the mainstream media and advocated basically mostly for them to be deported. And Australian officials not only ignored these complaints, but at one stage they threatened the Executive Council of Australian Jury that if they kept talking about this...

Farago of nonsense, then Jewish migration to Australia would be stopped. So clamped down on them quite strongly.

Waitman Beorn (39:33.474)
And I suspect that in the Cold War context, they also discounted that because they're leftists, right? So they must be communist and therefore this is also a bad thing. They can't be right because they're communist.

Jayne Persian (39:44.718)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So the Jewish Council of Anti-Fascism to combat fascism and anti-Semitism had one or two open communists on the board. And so, yes, it was just just sprayed as a communist organization.

Waitman Beorn (40:05.986)
So, I mean, this is really fascinating because it's different, I think, than, and again, you're the expert and that's not me, but, you know, it's certainly in the American context. I don't think we put them in camps or force them to work or anything like that. They just sort of, they jumped into society, but they often jumped into at least, and again, this is only because I know what happened to some of the Ukrainians from my book, but they ended up, you know, they, they're embraced by the local Ukrainian, you know, community, but they're not in camps, but.

What's going on in the camps? Cause I think that's from your book, that seems like an important incubator for some later things that happen. What's going on in these camps in the two years that they're sort of in indentured servitude as it were.

Jayne Persian (40:49.934)
Yeah, so it is a really interesting contrast between Australia and America and Canada in that there were no existing community groups here. There were a small number of Estonians and that was it really. There were some Yugoslavs and they were pro-communist and so they hated the DP's. But there were no, for instance, were no, there was no real group of Ukrainians or, you know, there were individuals here and there, but there's no, there's no welcoming community organizations. But just like in the DP camps in Europe,

you find that this DP elite, which includes perpetrators, became part of the camp structure. became leaders of not only an administration, so being able to give out better jobs or screen you nicely, but also they then become

community leaders in the brand new communities that are set up in Australia.

Waitman Beorn (41:54.69)
And just as an aside, but I think an important one, as you point out, not everybody who is emigrating in these groups is a perpetrator. many of them or some of them may not even be particularly supportive of those folks. What's their situation like? mean, are they just kind of like cowed in a submission and trying to keep their heads down?

Jayne Persian (42:11.682)
Yeah, that's true.

Waitman Beorn (42:22.454)
And then I'm almost imagining kind of a prison situation where you're the new guy in prison and they're sort of the people that, the prisoners that sort of, prisoner society that run the prison and you just kind of want to like not anger them because they have the power.

Jayne Persian (42:38.264)
And yes, and I should say I am focusing on right wing and particularly perpetrators in this new book. I wrote previously a book about the DP scheme in Australia in which that was not a focus at all. Most DPs were not perpetrators or far either, mostly civilians who just didn't want to go back to Soviet rule. I think the community

The is really interesting. There's a lack of sources, particularly if you're not in that particular ethnic community. But we are very fortunate, I think, in Australia, we have quite a few of these ethnic community archives and libraries. And I hit pay dirt, when the Estonian archives in Sydney donated lots and lots of their documents to the state library, which is open to anyone, to researchers.

all in English, thankfully, and which included quite a few of these far-right people in the minutes of particular meetings. So I could actually trace how particular people were, who I know now were perpetrators or far-right ideologues, were trying to take over ethnic community groups. And then they became leaders of the Captive Nations Council, for example, in Australia.

as well as the local branch of the ABN. And these groups also had, sorry, the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which is a Ukrainian or OUN originated group. So these are anti-Soviet, anti-Russian groups, which then I was able to trace through those archives initially. They're links with Australian right wing.

Waitman Beorn (44:09.76)
which is the...

Jayne Persian (44:34.286)
political parties and groups. So that was really interesting, including I think one of the most surprising cases was a Hungarian DP who was actually on the periphery of the real Hungarian Nazis, the real arrow cross guys, the hungarist movement people, because he was a bit younger. But he obviously quite liked that sort of thing. And he co-founded an iteration of the Nazi party in Australia.

in the early 1960s, which was then, because he was a bit of a weak leader, which was then practically taken over by local members of the Croatian Estasi. So that's really interesting to sort of figure out what they were doing. mean, the Hungarians, so in my book, I do focus on the Hungarians and the Croatians because the Hungarians movement were involved in the Swastika Dabbings, which was

an international thing in the early 60s, but in Australia, they were very much done by Hungarians, it seems. They also published fascist newspapers, including in English, to attract far-right Australians. So that was unexpected to me that that happened. And the Croatians, of course, are the most famous DP diaspora group, famous, infamous for their spate of terrorists.

bombings in the 60s and 70s, particularly in which Australians were leading that terrorist movement. So amazing.

Waitman Beorn (46:10.21)
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's really fascinating to this. I mean, this. Sort of transnationalization of. Of I guess, Nazism in the sense of like neo-Nazis that, you know, that the creations in the Hungarian Hungarians and some of the other groups. They had that on the one hand, they you point out in the book, you they have their own organizations and they take over sort of neutral organizations that are more just sort of ethnic.

fellowship community organizations. take those over and make them into their specific sort of national right-wing Australian organization. But then they're also offering, they're also creating like essentially a neo-Nazi party that's open to everyone. You know, whereas you might not, if you're Hungarian, you probably wouldn't join the Croatian far right community organization, but together they can join this neo-Nazi party.

Jayne Persian (47:04.94)
Yeah. And look, I should say it didn't last for long. Thankfully, I guess. But it was just interesting to me that there were these connections between Australians and migrant group, these migrant DP groups. They also had connections with each other, particularly the Hungarians and the Croatians were using each other's printing presses and that sort of thing. I think there's a lot more research to be done.

on a micro level about these community organizations because I think it's interesting. We talk about transnational fascism a lot these days. And I think really fascist ideation survived migration. And really, I in my conclusion, I talk about COVID and the anti-vax movements. And of course, we see Trump and Musk currently.

We always see Croatian flags in Australia when there are those sort of right-wing movements.

Croatians that I'm picking on. But I just think that's interesting that 10 or 15 years ago we would have perhaps laughed to think that there was a fascist undercurrent in Australian history. And yet it's been there the whole time and particularly nurtured by some of these DP groups that were actual perpetrators in the Second World War.

Waitman Beorn (48:32.79)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of things that was really fascinating and I suppose somewhat scary from your book is sort of the way that they integrate in a general way, like great, they integrate into the country, they become quote normal Australians, but also they integrate, these far right people integrate into the far right.

And the far right integrates into them. mean, and I was just I was amazed because I didn't know any of this, you know, that particularly, I guess, the Croatians and maybe you can talk a little about this, too, because it was just a fascinating piece of the book. Are basically establishing like terrorist training camps or I guess terrorists is the wrong word, but like, well, they would say maybe like freedom fighter training camps, but then literally shipping these people back to Europe. To fight in Yugoslavia, I mean, that was that was mind blowing to me.

Jayne Persian (49:28.91)
Yeah, look, I'm quite proud of quite proud of this little group. And I should say it wasn't just the Croatians that I've definitely got evidence of Latvians, Ukrainians having sort of guerrilla training camps in the Australian bush right throughout, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s. There's really that sense of.

inculcating the youth with their own, you know, sort of militarism and obviously, ultranationalism. The Croatians, so in 1963, nine young Croatian Australians. So again, these are the sons of the original cohort.

Jayne Persian (50:14.926)
in broad terms, of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood, crossed the border into Yugoslavia in order to engage in acts of sabotage. So they were pretty unsuccessful. They all got jailed for quite some time. But in 1972, there was another incursion in which 19 Croatian Australians waged a guerrilla war against the largest deployment of the Yugoslavian Territorial Defence Forces in socialist Yugoslav history.

As an Australian, anytime Australia makes the international news, no matter what for, I think we can be a little bit proud. I think that's actually amazing for a tiny little diaspora group from Australia to have way. And I can't remember how many days this lasted, but it was quite lengthy. These guys with really no real training took on the Yugoslav army.

So as much as it's sort of diaspora and politics and sometimes there's a sense of people having that sort of nostalgia about the past and a lot of words, right, to make yourself feel better about being in this new country where you have very little power. Actually, you know, there were real actions that occurred throughout this period.

And a lot more going on on a sub training level that we really don't know about. Yeah, which I just think is really, really interesting.

Waitman Beorn (51:54.242)
And of course they're, they're, they're cloaking. mean, they're, they're far right in all the other ways too, but they're cloaking this as, as, as anti-communist. And so, you know, in that sense, they are, they are viewing themselves and hoping the rest of the world will view them as these sort of heroic, you know, guerrilla fighters, but you know, they're also the antisemites and, know, know, anti Serbs or whatever. mean, all of that is still part of their, of their sort of.

worldview but it's just that that's the part that sort of is not for public consumption you know that is sort of remaining under the radar I suppose

Jayne Persian (52:31.106)
That's right. That is right. And I think obviously there are arguments to be made for whether particular groups of Croatians are fascist or not fascist, when ultranationalism blends into fascism and all that sort of thing. I basically was a bit wary actually of calling the Croatians fascist until I realized that quite a few of them

had been perpetrators, whether that was of Jewish part of the Holocaust or of Serbian ethnic cleansing. And also that they were quite, some of them were quite proudly self-describing themselves and the Croatian Nistarši movement as fascist. Yeah, so that's where that thread comes in because it is of course a lot more complicated than you can describe just in a few minutes. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (53:27.656)
And maybe we should move to, guess, a somewhat happier moment, which is that when, I suppose, when Australia decides that it actually is going to start investigating these people for real and potentially charging them. Can you talk a little about that evolution and the results of that?

Jayne Persian (53:49.582)
Right, so just as Australia had followed the British and American lead at the end of the war in ignoring war crimes, really, in the 1980s, obviously, America had started investigating war crimes in 1979. And so there was sort of an international movement towards that as well as homegrown pressure. But there had always been homegrown pressure. But 1986, the Australian government has an inquiry.

comes up with a list of 70 suspected war criminals and basically says, look, after looking at the documents, yes, there's a great there's a really good chance that we did resettle war criminals. But instead of initiating a denaturalization and deportation process, as I think the United States did really quite successfully. So all that happened in the States was that you had to prove that there was something false.

on the immigration document in order to deport them. I mean, you know, a bit more complicated, but that's the simple process. In Australia, the decision was made to go to a full criminal trial under Australian law for war crimes, but basically for murder. Okay, so you had to have...

you know, had to have documentary evidence and eyewitnesses to an individual perpetrator killing somebody. Right. So which is ridiculous. You think about the Holocaust by bullets. This is just not going to happen. Anyway, I could have told them that, but that's not what happened. they set up a special investigations unit. They investigated around 800 cases, not amazingly thoroughly, although the historians did some great work. So Conrad

Quate was the consultant historian to the SIU and worked closely with Martin Dean, who is a real hero in this field. And they estimated that up to 5,000 war criminals and collaborators might have resettled in Australia. That was just a best guess. Whether they would fulfill any of those criteria, particularly for murder, no. So they looked at over 800 cases.

Jayne Persian (56:05.902)
There were three trials and no convictions, which is pretty dismal, but it was just really an impossible task to prosecute under Australian law.

Waitman Beorn (56:10.23)
Wow.

Waitman Beorn (56:19.298)
It's interesting because in a somewhat completely different context, after 1949, when the Germans take over their prosecution of war criminals and Nazis, they say, we're going to use the pre-war legal code, so no crimes against humanity, no genocide, that kind of stuff.

And they, you know, and they basically ended up using only murder, which for all the reasons you just identified, it was very difficult to convict because, you know, they, they wanted, they, they were trying to, to, convict a crime the same way you would convict a crime of somebody who like shots one on the street in Berlin. And of course you can't do that in this situation, but it's interesting that Australia comes up with that same, not super helpful process.

Jayne Persian (56:58.488)
Yep. Yep.

Waitman Beorn (57:08.93)
from a completely different direction. Why don't they go with the, lied on your documents? Because even in your book, you point out that there are people who, mean, people are amazing. There was one person you had in there who basically.

He had lied about being in that he was a German, like Austria or something. He was literally like a Nazi in the, in the German army and he lied about it. But then he wanted his family to come over. And so he goes back and he says, Hey, sorry, I lied about this, but can now that I'm not lying about it, can you read my family? they were like, Nope, you lied about it. And they, deported him. So why did they decide not to do this in the case of, of the far right people?

Jayne Persian (57:50.21)
Yeah, it's, I mean, to begin with, it was because there were thoughts about deporting security issues in the very beginning, so 47, 48, 49, but the IRA was wrapping up. So where do you deport them to? You can't deport them to the Soviet Union, although they did deport a few people, but not, I don't think, for far right security issues, they would have been communists.

They did deport a few people to the Soviet Union, but it wasn't a real solution. Germany, Italy, Austria, basically they all just refused to take any of these people. so that was a, look, there is a really lengthy legal argument in the inquiry report about the various laws, Australian laws that would prevent that from happening. I'm not a lawyer, but

we did bring in a whole new law to prosecute the War Crimes Act Amendment Act to prosecute these guys. know, I'm not, I, the person who wrote the inquiry report recommended deportation or denaturalization and deportation, but it just turned out to be too difficult. A cynic might say that the government knew that

prosecutions under Australian criminal law would be impossible. And so it looks like you've made an effort and then the problem goes away. So they shut it down in 1992.

Waitman Beorn (59:20.801)
I mean.

Because you mentioned, and of course for me as an American now living in England, it was very confusing to me that the conservatives in Australia are the liberal party. I got it, I got it. But it seems like that one of the things that happens as these immigrants are becoming more settled is that they're also cultivating political relationships with the sort of.

Jayne Persian (59:32.524)
Yeah, sorry about that.

Waitman Beorn (59:50.178)
And again, I'm using these terms and I don't want to offend anybody, but like the native Australians and the meaning of the native Australian, guess the the white Australian political leadership, obviously the Aborigines are the native Australians. But in any case, these are they are cultivating relationships with the people in power on the right politically. And so does that also have some influence on?

Jayne Persian (01:00:08.588)
Yep. Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:17.068)
the reluctance to sort of do anything meaningful to deport these people? Like are they advocating behind the scenes?

Jayne Persian (01:00:23.522)
Look, potentially, I think there's a bit more research actually that needs to go into that. Mark Ahrens, who was an investigative journalist in the late 70s and 80s, followed up some of these people who had made, had become leaders in the Liberal Party or recognised. one of my guys, my guys,

became quite influential in one of the state Liberal Party branches and had a far right faction in that branch. This was really well known. It was reported in newspapers throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s. And Jewish groups and Mark Ahrens particularly brought that public attention. So yes, I would say that the Liberal Party would not necessarily be on board. So it was the Labor Party that brought it in in the 50s, which is our, I guess, more left center.

There were, you know, ugly debates as the Act was passing. Very anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by various, particularly various representatives of ethnic groups, the ethnic groups concerned. Yeah, so this was a Labor... The narrative at the moment really is that the Labor Prime Minister at the time was very pro...

Jewish and particularly pro-Israel. And it was also just, I guess, following the Americans. The British later on also did the same thing as did the Canadians. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:59.394)
So maybe we can bring us up to sort of the present now that we have, I guess, probably what the second generation, third generation of these people. What's the status now? What is the status of sort of these ethnic communities? Are they still sort of...

engaging in this sort of far right. And again, I'm painting with a broad brush and obviously not everyone in these communities is doing this. But, you know, are they still these sorts of hotbeds of far right sort of extremism? And what does that look like in Australia?

Jayne Persian (01:02:39.638)
So again, a lot of this is unknown, really. And so I must again pick on the poor Croatians because I do get tagged probably once a week at the moment, particularly with Croatians being naughty. That would be things like photographs underneath portraits of Pavlić, which are still very common in Croatian clubs around the country.

waving the Ustasa flag, very, very common activity, which has obviously is having a moment at the moment as well, but it has been there the whole time. And so that's, you know, concerning. And I imagine that that is perhaps also the case in other communities that we're not aware of because the Croatians have always been very open.

and publicity seeking, I guess. I'm very proud of the Astasha past. But I think maybe in more positive news that the Australian public's more willing to accept that we did resettle war criminals as well as survivors of the Holocaust. So our narrative has been very much, we resettled Jewish survivors. We're great. We also resettled war criminals.

And that is becoming a little bit more accepted. whereas for decades it was just hidden and our attorney general actually said in 1961 quite infamously, the time has come to sort of forget about this and we're not ever talking about this again. But just recently, a couple of years ago, Lithuanian art benefactor was uncovered by a community member.

who wrote away to Lithuanian archives and found out that he'd been a member of the Waffen SS and involved in, you know...

Jayne Persian (01:04:46.382)
I can't quite remember the details, but definitely suspicious activity that was investigated by Conrad Quaid again, who now works at the Sydney Jewish Museum. And plaques were actually removed and notes put on the City Council website, which would never have happened 20 or 30 years ago. So that's, I think, positive. Also, I think the popularity of family history, particularly as we're getting now, these are the

very aged children of the original perpetrators. So you're looking at 70s usually would be the children's age. More descendants are actually wanting to find out what their fathers did in the war. So there's an Australian TV show that's really brilliant called Every Family Has a Secret, which uses archivists and historians in Eastern Europe.

And it's made programs, I think we're up to about five of alleged perpetrators and they all turned out, yes, to have been either members of, for instance, the Hungarian Aero Cross or to have been implicated in acts of perpetration. So I think actually that's quite a positive thing, making this history more part of the mainstream that we're able to have open conversations about.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:09.824)
And does this, because I know in other places, the sort of descendants, know, in Latvia, there's, least up until recently, may still be going on, there's like a parade of the Latvian Legion every year, you know, celebrating all of that. And oftentimes this all blurs into assaults on Jewish memorials or Jewish...

things, you know, or the Holocaust itself. Is this something that happens also in Australia from these groups?

Jayne Persian (01:06:48.716)
not currently that I'm aware of. There definitely have been instances in the past. But I'd say that, you know, we're talking decades ago. things like the Faulkner Cemetery in Melbourne is quite famous because it has a statue to Simon Petlura, the, I'm I'm actually,

so certain I'm not pronouncing that correctly. The Ukrainian nationalist who was killed in I think 1920, 21. So he's a nationalist hero and I guess a precursor to the OUN. And so things like raids were put on that. It's massive. It's a massive statue for a very long time. And the same cemetery actually went for a walk around a couple of years ago. And there are again plinths to

I think it is actually the Latvian Legion. Again, they're massive with names of people who died during the war as part of particular units, which was right next to a really old Jewish cemetery, a section of the cemetery, which I found quite shocking. And I've researched it. I talked to the cemetery itself. No one seems to have ever noticed.

And again, I think very protected in Australia because Australians, most Australians would have no clue what that would have been referring to.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:26.188)
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because you mentioned that and there's, I think there's a, has been for many years, a similar sort of debate in Canada about, you know, monuments to victims of communism and, or, you know, these, which is to be fair, I mean, like there are victims of communism, right? mean, like, not, I'm not whitewashing communism, but when they're put up by Ukrainians, for example, they often include things like, you know,

like this or by other groups, know, that they often are serving sort of, it's two messages, right? There's the message for the un indoctrinated, who don't know what they're looking at, which is, this is nice. You know, remembering people who fought the communists, fought the Soviets, or people who fought for their country or people who were victims. But then if you're initiated and you know what that is, it's something different. know, it's a group of people that are...

will say not to be commemorated. But it's fascinating that that group, because presumably those people aren't buried in that cemetery. So they've just made a monument to sort of the war dead, if you will, in their new country. these are also.

Jayne Persian (01:09:40.684)
Yeah, no, that's right. Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:46.69)
You know, there's more as you point out at the beginning of the podcast, right? There's more to that story. They're not just the war dead. You know, they are people of a particular particular band. think that's that's a fascinating sort of memorial piece.

Jayne Persian (01:09:52.238)
You

Jayne Persian (01:09:59.726)
And look, I think that's really what I've tried. As I said at the beginning as well, I'm a historian, an Australian historian of migration is how I would describe myself. Very obviously I've written lots about this post-war displaced persons. This book is really an effort to bring the Holocaust into that story and to actually say, okay, well we can talk about nationalism and obviously victims of communism. But.

drilling down into it, you know, if you focus a lot of these groups, for instance, the Ukrainians, equate the famine, the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s with the Jewish Holocaust. And so, you you get them saying things in the 80s, like, well, are you going to persecute Jewish communists in Australia? Because I've got a list of names for you, and they might have been implicated in the famine, right? So there's this real tit for tat.

really, you know, I think quite immature understanding of the complexities. And there's been no real, as we've seen, I guess, in Canada, sorry to pick on Canada, over the last couple of years, there's been no real attempt to break that dichotomy. The people are still very stuck in that narrative, they're wedded to that narrative. And I think that's really what I'm trying to do with this book.

is saying, you know, yes, I see you, understand you, I know a lot about you. But some of you were involved in this and the narratives that the community is always putting out doesn't address that issue, which is obviously hugely important.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:43.594)
Yeah, I mean, think that that definitely comes through because I think one of the things that you do well is sort of show that, look, this isn't just a kind of like vibes like you're giving off fascist vibes like you are. You are like many of those people were like literally war criminals and and were, you know, taking a series of intentional conscious choices to

in the post-war period continue to sort of advance that agenda and that kind of thing. So it's not just this sort of, you were kind of in the wrong, but these are, there's material concrete things that you can point to and say like these people are doing this. And I think you're right that particularly with this group of perpetrators.

for a lot of people, it's just, too complex. And it's much easier to either, they either are Nazis or they're, you know, nationalist, anti-communists, but it's, it's very difficult to sort of unpick that. And so, you know, because people, all people are sort of generally lazy, you know, they just, we're not gonna, we're not gonna go down that road. And then that also, of course, plays to the benefit of...

of the groups that want to portray themselves in a certain light, because they'll just let that run and not step out and say, you know, I'm sure there are, I mean, obviously there are wonderful people in these groups and who aren't fascists, right? And who aren't neo-Nazis and that kind of stuff. And I'm sure that there are people that are in these groups who have perhaps in ways that we don't know, tried to sort of

push back against this, I suspect it can be very difficult, particularly even in a three generations later in an immigrant community where that may be your sort of major kinship group to push back against that, because it's kind of may feel like or be painted like a betrayal of some kind to sort of your national group or whatnot.

Jayne Persian (01:13:58.51)
Yeah.

Yeah, I just still think it's surprising though that even now we get histories by academic historians even of particular groups or the DP scheme in Australia that doesn't even mention that there could have been or there definitely were perp traders in that cohort and that, you know, that sort of ultra nationalist thinking can also be problematic. You know, hence the Second World War.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:30.656)
Yeah. mean, in a certain sense, it's something that is a larger, I think, phenomenon in the public today, which is, you know, why are historians always pointing out the bad things about our country? You know, and like, why can't we just recognize that our country was awesome and did great things? And so there might be an Australian nationalist moment there too of just like, let's not trash Australian history by pointing out that

Jayne Persian (01:14:31.296)
That is...

Jayne Persian (01:14:43.021)
Yeah.

Jayne Persian (01:14:57.772)
Well, I tell you that actually the worst thing is as a migration historian, Australia obviously still has quite restrictive migration policies. We put refugees, boat people in camps, know, we're very border control, strong border control, all that sort of thing. We have quite a racist history of migration. And so it actually is quite difficult as a migration historian who loves migrants and, you know, quite

strongly multiculturalism to then have to point out the faults in some of these migration schemes and in multiculturalism as well, which does tend to privilege community viewpoints. So I think community viewpoints rather than, you know, a broader context. and they're really unquestioned for good reasons, like it comes from a good place, I think.

People are trying not to be racist and be welcoming and inclusive. But unfortunately, it's really offered a sanctuary not only for this group, but for other perpetrator migrant groups as well in the late 20th century. So that can be, as it has in the UK. know I was reading something recently. So it is quite difficult to do that.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:21.106)
I mean, suspect that part of the, sorry, I expect that part of the problem is, as you point out, you don't want the sort of current citizens of a country, in Australian case, predominantly white or whatever, to be telling an immigrant group, this is what you're.

your group means, or this is what your group stands for, right? Cause that, that is, you know, paternalistic and can be racist, et cetera, et cetera. but then there's that tension with the fact, but actually we have documents that we can prove that some of you are this, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not saying that all of you are. And I think we've done a good job in the, in the podcast of saying like, not everybody in these groups are these things, but that doesn't obviate the fact that

Jayne Persian (01:17:07.726)
Yeah, of course,

Waitman Beorn (01:17:11.862)
there are enough of them that are that it makes it an issue.

Jayne Persian (01:17:15.438)
Well, yeah, I I got onto this subject, obviously, my husband's grandfather was a Cossack and part of the Cossack army. But that still didn't really click with me until I started interviewing people who were D.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:15.104)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:40.93)
Yeah, I mean, and I look forward to sort of the next iteration of your research. I mean, it's really fascinating because one of the things that I am sort of personally interested in and historically interested in is these family relationships as time goes by as well. So that's really fascinating. But speaking of time, I know it's like late there because you're all the way across the world. Maybe we should close with the question that we always ask, which is.

What is one book on the Holocaust that you'd recommend to our listeners?

Waitman Beorn (01:20:17.098)
Yeah, I mean, and that's sort of a...

One of the things, one of the, one of the pieces of show that people who haven't seen it, you know, are probably less familiar with, but the, he, those, those, those hidden camera interviews are just amazing. And, and especially there, even though they're, they're also are ones that didn't make it in. And, know, there's one where the guy starts to like assault, assault him, Lanzmann and his cameraman. have to like run out of the house. mean, like those are really fascinating.

But yeah, thank you so much. for our listeners, again, you're enjoying, is not the right word, I know, but if you're enjoying the podcast, finding it interesting, please leave us a comment or subscribe or like or whatever on the various sites. And again, Jane, thank you so much for staying up late at night in Australia and coming on and talking about your project.