Published: 26 May 2026
Last updated: 27 May 2026
Australia accepted more Holocaust survivors per capita outside of Israel than any other country on Earth. Almost 30,000 Jews escaped to Australia, believing they would be far from the clutches of Hitler’s henchmen.
That's the truth. But it’s not the whole truth.
An estimated 4,000-5,000 alleged Nazis were also welcomed here. Horrifically, many of them travelled on the same boats as the Jews.
Perpetrators and survivors. The torturers and the tortured. Nazis and Jews.
It gets worse. The government knew there were Nazis living next door, turned a blind eye and even covered it up.
This is one of several bombshell revelations I discovered while making The Hunt for the Last Nazis, a new feature documentary for SBS.
The context is key: World War II was over. The Nazis defeated. Communists were the new enemy. Fear of the “Red Peril” was real.
At the same time, “Populate or perish” was Australia’s post-war mantra. The nation-building project required young, strong immigrants. Men who were not Communists. And, crucially, who were white.
The so-called “Beautiful Balts” ticked the boxes. Of the 170,000 displaced persons who were welcomed here, many were from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Unsurprisingly, some had blood on their hands. The Jewish communities of these three Baltic states were all virtually wiped out. Of the 210,000 Jews in pre-war Lithuania, almost 195,000 were murdered – more than 90 per cent. Latvian Jewry suffered a similar near-annihilation. Estonia was declared “Judenfrei” by 1942.
Comments4
Naomi Vallins2 June at 08:10 am
I watched your documentary with great interest and strong emotions. My late uncle, Meleikh Bakalczuk knew Polyukovich when he lived in Serniki. My uncle escaped the ghetto and he became a partisan. Later he wrote a memoir about his experiences in Yiddish. In it he writes about Ivan Polukhovich and two other members of the Polykovich family. He describes him as lying in wait to kill Jews. The deliberateness his actions convey is chilling. Bakalczuk recounts how on one occasion a relative of Polyukhovich gave him and several children shelter after their partisan camp was discovered and everyone there had to flee. He hides them in a barn for a few days albeit reluctantly. He also writes about Polyukhovich’s father who actually spoke Yiddish. The last two instances about this family point to a degree of neighbourliness which makes what happened during the Holocaust even more disturbing
David Warner31 May at 01:07 pm
My mother and father were “ten pound Poms”. They emigrated from Britain in the late 1950s. On board the ship there were many European nationalities, amongst them, a large group of Germans. Mum said, many of the women showed photographs of themselves in full uniform, skirts, high boots, shirts and jackets, carrying whips. They were very proud. She felt these women had been associated with death camps. They were rough, hard women. The shocking thing was they were emigrating to Australia. Had the authorities not vetted these people properly? Not by the look of it.
Bob James29 May at 01:58 am
Fantastic and shocking though the article is, to say we now have corrected the half-story, made it “whole” asks but does not pursue the next needed blank -analyses – why no convictions. Was it our intelligence connections with our bigger allies? Was there external pressure from “foreign” countries?
Thank you for your investigations and your article.