Review: The slaughter of Lithuanian Jews

This book review was originally published by The Jerusalem Report. Used by permission.

On April 4, 1945, Leyb Koniuchowsky sat down in Kovno with Lithuanian Holocaust survivor Dina Zisa Flaum and carefully recorded by hand her testimony in Yiddish regarding her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. Flaum was one of the very few survivors of the community of Rasein (in Yiddish), or Raseiniai (in Lithuanian), a pre-war community of some 6,000 Jews, and Koniuchowsky was a man on a mission, a sacred mission. Originally from Alytus, Lithuania, Koniuchowsky survived the Kovno Ghetto and decided to record the testimonies of all the (few) Jews who had miraculously survived in the small shtetlach (villages with Jewish communities) in the provinces.

Of the 220,000 Jews who lived under the Nazi occupation in Lithuania, only about 8,000 survived. The overwhelming majority of them, however, were from Lithuania’s large urban Jewish communities in Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), and Shavli (Siauliai), where the Nazis had established ghettos and kept alive several thousands of Jewish forced laborers. The decimation in the small communities was almost total.

Flaum’s testimony was particularly important because she had seen at least one of the mass murders in Rasein (not all the Jews were murdered at the same time) and could identify several of the killers. This is her description of one of the most horrific crimes she witnessed:

“While lying in the hay [close to the murder site], I clearly saw two women standing near the pit [which the victims fell into after being shot] smashing the skulls of small children with a large rock or killing the children by smashing their heads together. One of the women was the student Klimaite.”

Koniuchowsky started his project in Lithuania immediately after the end of World War II, and later continued in the displaced persons camps in Germany for several years. By the time he finished in 1948, he had collected testimonies about over 100 communities, and he sought a publisher to publish his collection in its entirety. And that’s where the story of this book hit a very unfortunate snag. By this time, he had immigrated to the United States, and he could not find any publisher willing to print his entire book as recorded by its author. And, believe it not, that was still the situation 32 years later when I first met Koniuchowsky in 1980 in Israel while I was working as a researcher for the Office of Special Investigations of the US Justice Department, established to prosecute the Nazis who had entered the United States illegally by hiding their service with the Nazis. I tried to convince Koniuchowsky to let me see the material, but he adamantly refused.

He kept on saying that he collected the testimonies for the kedoshim [martyrs], to which I replied in utter desperation, that those who had turned them into kedoshim were walking around free, and that there is every chance that they will die in peace and tranquility if we cannot have access to his material – all to no avail. Only nine years later was the problem solved, after Prof. Dov Levin, a survivor of Kovno and the world’s leading expert on the fate of Baltic Jewry in the Holocaust, finally convinced Koniuchowsky to donate his collection to Yad Vashem, even though they did not commit to publishing his magnum opus.

According to press reports, Koniuchowsky was getting old, and he wanted to make sure that he kept his promise to the victims. “They yelled, ‘Brothers and sisters, Yidden, please remember us! Take revenge for our poor blood! And I didn’t forget for a minute of my life.” What Yad Vashem did do was publish a book titled Expulsion and Extermination; Holocaust Testimonials from Provincial Lithuania. It gives an in-depth treatment of the various stages of the persecution and murder of the Jews, using excerpts from the testimonies to illustrate the trials and tribulations suffered by the Jewish inhabitants of the more than 200 Lithuanian towns and villages that had Jewish communities.

The unique historical significance of Koniuchowsky’s project becomes clearly apparent because the witness statements provide critical dimensions and details of the tragic fate of approximately half of Lithuanian Jewry, the most important of which are the major role played by local volunteers from all strata of Lithuanian society in the mass murders, and the incredible cruelty of the perpetrators.

In view of the persistent efforts of successive Lithuanian governments since independence to hide and/or minimize the role of locals in the murders, The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews is an invaluable addition to the historical record of the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry, and it makes available vital information for the English-speaking public. This is not an easy or comfortable read, and the format is not read- er-friendly, but its 569 pages present a message that must be heard and learned.

I cannot conclude this review without two additional points. The first relates to the potential importance of the testimonies in the efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. Koniuchowsky’s collection consisted of 1,684 pages of testimony in Yiddish, and listed the names of 1,284 participants, only 121 of whom we had information about from other sources.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. His latest book (with Ruta Va- nagaite) is Our People; Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Given our ability to trace the immigration destinations of thousands of Holocaust perpetrators, especially from the Baltics, to the Anglo-Saxon democracies, the decades-long delay in obtaining access to the testimonies was a veritable tragedy, which allowed many killers to escape punishment. The fact that it was a survivor, well aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, who refused to cooperate, makes it much more painful. One final note. This volume has 121 testimonies from the Koniuchowsky collection, but for some reason additional witness statements were not included, including the testimony of Dina Flaum cited above. Their omission is not explained.

IHRA’s Success and Difficult Dilemma

This week we observe International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp as mandated by the United Nations in 2005. If there was initial skepticism regarding this initiative, especially in countries which already had designated their own memorial days linked to the dates of important local events in the history of the Shoa, like Israel for example, I think that by now there is general approval for the need for an international memorial day observed all over the world on the same date. Thus one day can be devoted primarily to mourning, while the other day can be reserved for dealing the very important political issues which relate to the causes which led to the Shoa, and particularly anti-Semitism.

One organization which has accurately recognized the connection between the Shoa and its anti-Semitic roots, and is trying to uproot the latter, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has become one of the most important groups promoting Holocaust education throughout Europe, North and South America, and Israel. IHRA was founded in May 1998 by Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, who was shocked by a survey which showed that many Swedish schoolchildren lacked knowledge of the Holocaust, as well as his visit to the site of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. Originally named the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, Germany and Israel joined the initiative the same year as its first members.

Today, 35 countries are full members of IHRA, and 10 additional countries have Observer status. IHRA is playing a major role in a variety of areas connected to Holocaust commemoration, Research and education, as well as in combatting anti-Semitism. And in fact, its most outstanding contribution has most probably been its adoption in 2016 of its Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, which according to the Combat Antisemitism Movement has been endorsed/adopted until the end of 2022, by a total of 1,116 entities, among them 39 countries, 464 non-federal government entities, 339 educational institutions, and 274 NGO’s and organizations. The definition, unlike various other descriptions of anti-Semitism, covers all the existing variations from right and left, including those focused on Zionism, and which unfairly single out Israel for criticism, which are often overlooked or ignored.

There are, however, various problems which plague IHRA’s activities. The first and foremost is that resolutions must be approved unanimously by all the member countries, but there are no consequences for those countries which do not implement them. The most disturbing example has to do with the issue of Holocaust distortion, which is rampantly prevalent in the post-Communist “new democracies” in Eastern Europe. In those countries, they do not deny the Holocaust, but they hide or minimize the highly significant role played by their nationals in the mass murder of the Jews, and promote the canard of equivalency between Communist and Nazi crimes thereby deflecting attention from their crimes and focusing attention on their suffering.

Thus in 2020, IHRA issued a Ministerial Declaration which addressed the issue in unequivocal terms as follows: “We accept our responsibility as governments to continue working together to counter Holocaust denial and distortion…We will continue to work closely with experts, civil society and our international partners to further these goals.” Another declaration under the heading of: “Leading global efforts to counter Holocaust and distortion,” specifically mentions “a shocking increase in efforts to minimize the impact of the Holocaust and downplay the crimes of the Nazi regime and its collaborators. This trend, in which Holocaust distortion inches toward the mainstream, erodes our understanding of the historical truth of the Holocaust and fuels antisemitism.”

IHRA has even created a tool kit against distortion, and the German Presidency launched a global task force against Holocaust distortion which was given an extra-budgetary contribution. In addition, a global campaign to raise awareness about Holocaust distortion was launched, using slogans such as “#Protect the Facts,” and “#Say No To Distortion.”

The problem is, however, that the same countries which are the worst offenders when it comes to distortion, such as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Croatia, Poland, Hungary and Romania cannot be punished, or expelled from IHRA. They remain members in good standing, and continue to deny the highly-significant role of their local collaborators in the murders. Thus, ironically, Croatia, a country which suffers from a significant proportion of Ustasha (Croatian fascists) supporters will ascend to the Presidency of IHRA, despite serious problems of Holocaust distortion ever since they became independent from Yugoslavia.

First published on Times of Israel

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. He serves on the International Council for the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand.

An 80-year search for ‘the student K,’ murderer of Jewish babies

First published by Times of Israel

This is a story about a Nazi war crimes investigation that began in 1945 and continued intermittently until 2021. It concerns the brutal murder of Jewish infants in Raseiniai (Rasein in Yiddish and Hebrew), Lithuania, and is a good example of why, even today, it is still important to try and achieve justice. This week we observe the International Holocaust Remembrance Day mandated by the United Nations in 2005, and therefore it is an especially appropriate time to share this episode in the ongoing efforts to hold the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes accountable.

In 1945, Leib Kunichowsky, a Lithuanian Jewish survivor of the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto, began to record the testimonies of the few Holocaust survivors from the local provincial communities. This was a particularly important mission in view of the extremely high murder rate in those towns and villages. Of the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania under the Nazi occupation, 96.4% (212,000) had been murdered, but most of the survivors were from the large ghettos of Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), and Shavli (Siauliai). Approximately 100,000 Jews lived in the provincial communities, which had been so terribly decimated at an even higher rate. For the next four years, initially in Lithuania and later in the Displaced Persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Kunichowsky sought out the few survivors and recorded their testimonies in Yiddish in longhand, making sure that both he and the survivors personally signed each and every page. The result of this mission was a collection of 1,684 pages of testimony in Yiddish that contained much priceless information about the fate of the provincial Jews.

Lithuania’s enthusiastic local collaborators

Kunichowsky’s collection also had another unique aspect, which made it even more valuable. Unlike many other testimony projects conducted at that time, he focused inordinate attention on the identity of the perpetrators, which in Lithuania was of particular significance due to the critical role played by local Nazi collaborators in the murders, especially in the provinces. And since, in almost all those locales, those who participated in the murders were often known to the local Jews, the survivors were able in many cases to identify their tormentors. The result was that Kunichowsky’s collection contained the names of 1,284 Lithuanian perpetrators, a veritable treasure of information of great potential value for prosecutors and investigators.

I first learned of the existence of the testimonies in 1980, while working as a researcher in Israel for the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which prosecuted the Nazi war criminals who had immigrated to the United States after World War II. They were very interested in obtaining access to the testimonies. The problem was that Kunichowsky had insisted his collection be published in its entirety, and until that took place, he was not willing to share any of its contents with anybody, for any reason. Thus for 40 years, it remained completely inaccessible. This obstacle was only overcome almost a decade later in late 1989, when Prof. Dov Levin, the leading expert on the Holocaust in the Baltics and, like Kunichowsky, a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto, persuaded him to donate his collection to the Yad Vashem Archives.

Once the collection had been deposited in the archives, I immediately set out, with the help of my father, to extract all the names of perpetrators in the testimonies, a total of 1,284 names, of which only 121 were already known from other sources. My next step was to try and discover whether any of these criminals had emigrated to Western democracies. (By this point, it was common knowledge that thousands of Eastern European Nazi collaborators had immigrated postwar to the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and New Zealand posing as innocent “refugees:”) This was possible by cross-referencing immigration data available in the International Tracing Service (ITS) records (also at Yad Vashem) with the testimonies, and in that manner I was able to find many dozens of suspects who had fled to the West and might still be alive.

Incredible cruelty

The testimonies in the Kunichowsky collection provide vivid details of the implementation of the Final Solution in Lithuania, the exceptionally critical role played by the local collaborators who were by far the majority of the killers, and the incredible cruelty of some of the perpetrators.

One of the testimonies which particularly upset me and clearly reflected the latter phenomenon was that of a woman named Dina Zisa Flum from the town of Rasein (Raseiniai), who survived by hiding in a pile of hay close to the pit where the murders took place in August 1941. In her testimony of April 4, 1945, she related that “While lying on the hay, I clearly saw two women standing near the pit [which the victims fell into after being shot-E.Z.] smashing the skulls of small children with a large rock or hitting the children by smashing their heads together. One of the women was the student K——.”

That image of “the student K.” has not left me ever since. Her family name (which shall remain under wraps for obvious reasons) indicated that she was single, but the witness did not indicate her first name. Even though I did not have her full name, I searched for her in the ITS records and found two possible candidates born two years apart who could fit the description and had fled Lithuania shortly after the war. The names were submitted about thirty years ago to the Nazi war crimes unit established in her emigration destination, but we never received any information on whether the local authorities had been able to ascertain whether either of the two female immigrants might be the infamous ‘student K.’

Fast forward another 30 years to the present. Our researcher on a different project, Dr. Abbee Corb, comes across my list of potential suspects, which included the two young women who might have been “the student K.,” and finds one of them alive and healthy at 97, residing not that far from her own home. The question then became whether we could verify her first name. In theory, the best solution would have been to send a trustworthy Lithuanian to speak to elderly residents of Raseiniai who may have known “the student K” or her family. But that town is now the COVID-19 capital of Lithuania, so no one is willing to take on the mission. Appeals on social media to find someone with links to Raseiniai residents also failed to produce a solution, but archival research appears to indicate that the elderly woman Abbee found might well be the criminal we have been looking for. Can we confirm it before the pandemic ends or she dies?

I cannot be sure, but I think our efforts, which hopefully will be successful, send an incredibly powerful message: If you brutally murder Jewish babies, there will be Jews, even 80 years later, who will strive to make sure you are held accountable. And that remains an important message in 2021 as well.

–

Dedicated to the memory of the Jewish babies brutally murdered in Raseiniai, Lithuania in August 1941.

Dr Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. He serves on the International Council for the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust

It was our pleasure to interview Dr Efraim Zuroff about his latest book, Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust, co-authored with Rūta Vanagaitė.

The book is a ‘collaboration between a Jewish Nazi-hunter named for a victim of the Holocaust in Lithuania and a renowned Lithuanian writer who descends from perpetrators of Holocaust crimes’.

The interview addresses the problem of Holocaust distortion and the double genocide theory i.e. the equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes. It traverses history, politics and covers a very personal story of a journey through the land to uncover Lithuania’s involvement in the Holocaust.

Press Release: Nazi Hunter joins NZ Holocaust Foundation's International Council

Dr Efraim Zuroff, has joined the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand, as a member of its International Council. 

Zuroff’s recent comments on the “local hero” status of Mt Hutt’s former Waffen-SS soldier Willi Huber have been widely reported in NZ and international media. 

Zuroff is the Coordinator of Nazi war crimes research for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. For the past four decades, he has played a leading role in helping to facilitate the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators all over the world, and is the person who revealed the immigration to New Zealand of dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals. A distinguished historian, he was among the first to identify the phenomenon of Holocaust distortion in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and is extremely active in combatting this dangerous problem.

The recipient of many awards and honours, Zuroff was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Perry Trotter, founder of the Holocaust Foundation said, “Holocaust memory is under threat and antisemitism is rising. We are delighted to have such an internationally well respected authority join us at such a time. Dr Zuroff will greatly strengthen our work.”

Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand is an educational charitable trust dedicated to preserving and protecting Holocaust memory, and communicating the Holocaust to a general audience, particularly through its acclaimed exhibitions. 

The Foundation’s latest exhibition is entitled “Auschwitz. Now.” and will be staged in Auckland in October, in partnership with AUT University. “Auschwitz. Now.” will be open to the public 6-13 October, 9am-9pm. Admission is free.

Guest Post: A controversial “legacy”

This year has seen the world taking a fresh look at notable “personalities” from the past and what they represent in a broader, historical context. In New Zealand, statues of colonial figures are being reassessed amidst discussion of how to better address the injustices of the country’s past.

In addition to the colonial era, New Zealand’s post-war policies around immigration and the response of successive governments to the presence of Nazi war criminals in the country have long been the subject of criticism from the Jewish community. 

A recent controversy over the legacy of a post-war Austrian émigré, who died on August 9, has brought these issues to the fore again. 

Willi Huber immigrated to New Zealand in 1953. He made a name for himself on the ski-fields and is considered one of the “founding fathers” of Canterbury’s Mt Hutt ski area. The mountain features a lasting memorial to him in the form of the Huber’s Run trail, a plaque and a café.

There is more to Huber’s past than his endeavours on the ski-fields, though. At 17, Huber volunteered for the Waffen-SS, where he served as a machine-gunner, earning two Iron Cross medals on the eastern front. After the war, he was held as a prisoner of war for 16 months.

Despite this, Huber has been the subject of several laudatory media stories, including a controversial TVNZ programme in 2017, which was heavily criticised for glossing over and minimising his Nazi past. 

Huber denied knowledge of any atrocities by the Waffen-SS and never expressed any remorse for his wartime activities.

Shortly after Huber’s death, Mt. Hutt Ski Area manager James McKenzie told the media the Huber’s Run ski trail would keep his name; “He made a new life and a new start here and tried to put that behind him. We are happy to respect his legacy. The context of what he went through in the war, nobody knows for sure what people did way back then.”

This comment ignited a maelstrom of criticism. Zionist Federation of NZ President Rob Berg started a petition calling for the removal of the “honouring legacy” for Huber from Mt Hutt, while community leaders like NZ Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses wrote impassioned columns asking why New Zealand was intent on honouring the legacy of an unrepentant Nazi.

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation contacted the renowned Nazi hunter Dr Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s office in Jerusalem. He said he could “state unequivocally that serving in a Waffen-SS unit on the eastern front, there is no way that Mr Huber could possibly not have been aware of the massive atrocities carried out by the SS… If we add the fact that he volunteered for the SS, and his comments that Hitler was ‘very clever,’ and …‘offered [Austrians] a way out’ of the hardships after World War I, it’s clear that Mr. Huber was an unrepentant Nazi, who doesn’t deserve any sympathy or recognition.”

For the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand’s chief executive, Chris Harris, there’s no doubt that Huber was aware of what was going on in the Waffen-SS. “Even if he didn’t participate in it, he was aware of it. For us that means that he should not be honoured and paid homage to.

“So we would love Mt Hutt to reconsider the renaming of that area… They can say he made a new life and so on. But that wasn’t possible for the millions of victims of the Nazis who never got that chance.”

The Huber controversy has also reignited niggling questions about exactly who was allowed into New Zealand after World War II and the lack of a satisfactory government response to post-war arrivals subsequently identified as war criminals.

Harris says that between 40 and 46 Nazi war criminals are known to have migrated to New Zealand after the war.  “They committed horrors, so how did they get in? You have to ask how was Immigration NZ assessing refugees? Were they just saying ‘oh, well you fought on the other side but it’s over now so you can come in’?”

In fact, New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon country that chose not to attempt any legal action against alleged Nazi war criminals within its borders, a reality described as “an embarrassment” by Zuroff.

Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand co-founder Sheree Trotter says that it is difficult to explain the government’s lack of response on identified war criminals – especially as it was so out-of-step with allies. 

“The specific case of Willi Huber could be explained by a number of factors. Many New Zealanders struggle to face our own colonial past where injustices and crimes were perpetrated by our forebears. It’s easier to take the view that we should just move on. That type of attitude, combined with lack of education and an easy-going-accept-people-at-face-value attitude, could explain how Huber managed to ingratiate himself into the local community.”

In both Harris and Trotter’s view, there is a great need for more research into New Zealand’s relationship with the Holocaust, as well as education on the Holocaust, to better address these issues. 

First published by AIJAC here.

Nazi Hunter Reacts To Death Of Local “Hero” SS-Waffen Soldier

Former Nazi Waffen-SS soldier Willi Huber died recently, aged 96. Having lived in New Zealand since 1953, Huber made a name for himself as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Canterbury’s Mt Hutt ski area. Hailed as a ‘heartland hero’, locals have appeared willing to ignore his Nazi past. 

In a 2017 TVNZ interview, Huber denied knowledge of the war crimes committed by the Waffen SS or German forces, or of the Nazi murder of about six million European Jews and millions of others, many of whom died in concentration camps run by the SS.

Speaking to the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation from Jerusalem this week, renowned Nazi Hunter and Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, Dr Efraim Zuroff commented:

As a historian, I can state unequivocally that serving in a Waffen-SS unit on the Eastern front, there is no way that Mr Huber could possibly not have been aware of the massive atrocities carried out by the SS and the Wehrmacht in the territories of the Soviet Union, where 1,500,000 "enemies of the Reich," primarily Jews, were murdered individually during the years 1941-1943.

Huber's statements ring incredibly hollow in the face of the historical record of the Holocaust on the Eastern front. If we add the fact that he volunteered for the SS, and his comments that Hitler was "very clever," and that he “offered [Austrians] a way out"  of the hardships after World War I, it's clear that Mr. Huber was an unrepentant Nazi, who doesn't deserve any sympathy or recognition.

In the early 1990s Zuroff pushed for the New Zealand government to investigate approximately forty suspected Nazi war criminals who found refuge in New Zealand after World War II. In 1991 New Zealand set up a two-person unit to investigate the allegations, but the government was unwilling to take legal action against suspected Nazis. 

An Interview With The Last Nazi Hunter: Part I from Perry Trotter on Vimeo.

In a 2018 interview, Zuroff stated that ‘New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon country, (out of Great Britain, United States, Canada and Australia - South Africa was not open to immigration at that time), that chose not to take legal action after a governmental inquiry into the presence of Nazis in New Zealand’.

"There was absolutely no political will to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1940s and early 1950s, posing as refugees fleeing communism.”

New Zealand’s historical willingness to grant entry and then turn a blind eye to suspected Nazi war criminals was accompanied by a reluctance to receive Jewish refugees. Obstacles faced by Jews seeking refuge in New Zealand are well documented. 

Huber has been granted a lasting legacy on Mount Hutt with a ski run named in his honour along with a plaque. He was also awarded a medal by the Austrian Government in 2002 for services to skiing and to Austria.

New Zealand has a legacy too - one of shame.

---

From Newsroom: NZ's Troubled Relationship With The Holocaust

First published on Newsroom

The dust is settling after a flurry of commemorative events and articles, locally and internationally, marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In the days leading up to UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), the hashtag #WeRemember circulated on social media, with encouragement to contemplate that horrific period of history.

UN Holocaust Remembrance Day falls at the height of New Zealand’s summer holiday season, when sun and surf are uppermost in many Kiwi minds. So it’s hardly surprising that Holocaust commemoration commands relatively little attention. Of greater concern, however, is that according to a poll undertaken in July 2019, New Zealand appears to suffer Holocaust amnesia. The multi-choice survey revealed that only 43 percent of respondents knew that approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, 20 percent thought fewer were killed, 37 percent were unsure, and worryingly, 30 percent were unsure whether the Holocaust had been exaggerated or was a myth.

Holocaust education is not compulsory in our schools - this may contribute to the knowledge gap. However, New Zealand’s failure to send a representative to the recent World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem suggests a problematic relationship to the Holocaust. Indeed, our history vis-à-vis the Holocaust makes for grim reading.

As Hitler’s programme of isolation, discrimination, and dispossession of Jews took hold in the 1930s, our local Jewish community undertook many desperate measures to bring family members to safety in New Zealand. Numerous statements of sympathy from the government, the churches, community groups and individuals were heard. Some groups showed great commitment to the Jewish people. The Christadelphians wrote letters and sent funds to the Jewish community. A Ngapuhi elder told me of his forbears travelling to Wellington to offer the government land for the Jewish refugees. They were told, “go back to your hovels”. The government did little to help refugees fleeing Europe.

In the period between 1933 and 1939 a paltry 1100 Jews were permitted into New Zealand - and those, under the most stringent requirements, as historian Ann Beaglehole describes in her book, A Small Price to Pay: Refugees From Hitler in New Zealand. Little consideration was given to their plight as refugees in a deadly predicament. Indeed, Auckland’s Rabbi Astor, writing to Mark Fagan, Acting Minister of Customs in 1939 on behalf of refugees seeking asylum in New Zealand, sought a waiver for one applicant who was unable to sign the form because he was in a concentration camp. The sponsoring relatives were required to declare that they would seek no further help for relatives or friends. New Zealand’s policy at that time was harsh and punitive.

Fortunately, New Zealand’s immigration policies no longer exhibit the xenophobia of yesteryear. More recent incidents, however, suggest there is still progress to be made in dealing properly with the Holocaust. Dr Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, also known as The Last Nazi Hunter, has spent much of his life tracking Nazi war criminals and bringing them to trial. Up to 46 Nazi war criminals are believed to have fled to New Zealand after World War II. Despite a two-year investigation by a government-formed, two-man taskforce in the early 1990s, none of the suspects was brought before a court of law.

Dr Efraim Zuroff was interviewed in Jerusalem by Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

In a 2018 interview, Zuroff stated that ‘New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon country, (out of Great Britain, United States, Canada and Australia - South Africa was not open to immigration at that time), that chose not to take legal action after a governmental inquiry into the presence of Nazis in New Zealand’.

Government policy and actions are not the only areas in which New Zealand has been found wanting. Our nation has the dubious distinction of being the only Western country in which a tertiary institution holds a thesis denying the Holocaust. In addition, New Zealand is also one of the few western-style liberal democratic nations that has not joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which promotes education, commemoration and research.

If we are to be a nation that gives ‘nothing to racism’, we must grapple with the Holocaust, its causes and our relationship thereto.

The antisemitism that drove the genocide of the Jews was not new - it had festered for millennia. However, the efficiency and drive of the Germanic version honed the process of killing. Murder was industrialised on a grand scale. Unfortunately, antisemitism continues to fester and we are now witness to a surge in antisemitic attacks around the world, on individuals and groups.

New Zealand is not immune to this phenomenon. In the past few weeks, there have been several incidences of swastikas painted in public places. News sites that reported the recent incident outside Temple Sinai in Wellington received comments such as the following:

You would be surprised at who did it…

Check the rabbis garage for fluro paint.

These attacks always end out being zionists going after the sympathy note. Amoral scumbags.

The vile comments, frequently seen on social media, prompted Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy to comment in 2018 that “If Facebook were around during the Third Reich these posts would’ve fitted right in…".

Antisemitism has an uncanny ability to change its form to suit the season. One of the most prevalent forms of Jew-hatred today comes in the form of anti-Zionism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Association has formulated a definition of antisemitism explicitly connecting anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The IRHA definition states:

“Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity’ with the proviso, ‘However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

In addition to the alarming rise in antisemitism, we are also witnessing the re-writing of history in a number of European nations, in an attempt to create distance from the genocide that occurred on their soil. The Holocaust may have happened in distant lands but its reverberations continue in our own. If New Zealand holds to the values of justice and standing against racism, it is incumbent on us to examine our own history in relation to the Holocaust and to step up efforts to ensure that antisemitism is given no ground.

Dr Sheree Trotter, Co-founder Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand (formerly Shadows of Shoah Trust)

Rewriting and distorting a difficult history

An Interview With The Last Nazi Hunter: Part II

(view PART I here)

The hateful attack on Jewish worshippers in a Chabad-Lubavitch center in Poway, near San Diego, has forcefully underlined the fact that bad ideas have tragic consequences.

The nineteen year old shooter, who in many respects appears to be an ordinary citizen with the same aspirations as other young people, had adopted a twisted view of Jewish people. The gunman’s letter, reminiscent of the antisemitic fabricated text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, drew on many of the traditional antisemitic stereotypes about power, money and control, blaming Jews for Society’s ills.

Efraim Zuroff shows what these entrenched stereotypes can lead to, by highlighting the role of local communities in the violence perpetrated on European Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis were able to carry out their murderous goals on a grand scale, because they found willing helpers - ordinary citizens with deeply entrenched antisemitic views.

The sad reality is that in every European country, even Denmark, the Nazis were able to recruit volunteers to help carry out mass murder. However, the difference between the Western and Eastern Europeans was that collaborators in the East became part of the mechanism of mass murder. 

Zuroff points out that until the fall of the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe had little opportunity to appropriately confront and process their role as collaborators in the Holocaust. An attempt to deal with an unconscionable history, combined with rising nationalist sentiment, has seen the narrative of the past rewritten in many of these countries and resulted in wholesale historical revisionism and Holocaust distortion.

Part II of our interview with Dr Zuroff at King David Hotel, Jerusalem.

An Interview With The Last Nazi Hunter: Part I

Last year we had the opportunity to interview Dr Efraim Zuroff at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Known as The Last Nazi Hunter, Efraim has spent much of his life tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to trial. I remembered seeing Efraim on a documentary about Nazis who had found their way to New Zealand and his attempts to bring them to justice.

Efraim made the point that New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon country, (out of Great Britain, United States, Canada and Australia - South Africa was not open to immigration at that time), that chose not to take legal action after a governmental enquiry into the presence of Nazis in New Zealand.

View Part II of the interview

A 2008 story in the Otago Daily Times addressed the New Zealand government’s decision not to take further action:

New Zealand set up a two-person unit in 1991 to investigate allegations that perpetrators of war crimes settled in this country.

The unit spent $190,000 investigating the claims in New Zealand and overseas, narrowing the suspected list from 46 to 17 known to be alive and living in the country.

The Wiesenthal centre had supplied 42 of the 46 names.

Fifteen were cleared and two were further investigated, with the unit finding it was "possible" one of the suspects was involved in war crimes.

The finding of the unit was presented by the then attorney-general, Mr Paul East.

"We feel we've discharged our obligations to the international community in the steps we've taken and that we will now only respond if we are given something far more substantial than individual names," Mr East said in 1992.

Dr Zuroff said the centre tried to convince successive New Zealand governments to take legal action against suspected Nazis, but to no avail.

"New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon democracy which faced this problem and chose to ignore it," he said.

"There was absolutely no political will to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1940s and early 1950s, posing as refugees fleeing communism."

"By the time that I found these people, many were no longer alive.

But one who was alive and living in Auckland was Jonas Pukas, a Lithuanian who served in the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion, which murdered tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and Belarus," Dr Zuroff said.

Given recent events in New Zealand, not only the massacre of Muslims by a terrorist, but the concerns of university students regarding far-right elements on campus and the casual attitudes of shopkeepers towards Nazi paraphenalia, it is timely to consider New Zealand’s relationship with the far-right.

A number of historical events give cause for concern. The New Zealand government’s reluctance to bring Nazi war criminals to justice was not the first questionable decision over the handling of the Holocaust. Our government was also reluctant to allow many Jewish refugees from the Holocaust to immigrate. In more recent times we’ve seen the University of Canterbury granting academic credentials to a Holocaust denier and TVNZ’s uncritical glorification of a Nazi Waffen-SS soldier.

The government’s poor response regarding Nazi war criminals raises uncomfortable questions.

Why were these Nazi crimes minimised?

How would we feel about Tarrant’s crimes being minimised in his old age?

Why is there a casual attitude toward Nazi symbols and paraphenalia when they are associated with genocide?

Is antisemitism taken seriously in New Zealand and is it opposed with as much passion as other forms of racism and hatred?