Tracing the Post-War Fates of Soviet Collaborators in Australia

• In Event: Internalizing the Impact of Exile: Migration Experience, Liberation, and Identity Change

Abstract

While no statistics exist, some scholars estimates that the number of Nazi collaborators entering Australia in the post-war period range from 500 to 5,000. The majority of them were natives of Eastern European countries such as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, or Yugoslavia. Between 1947 and 1952, they arrived on Australian shores from Europe among the nearly 200,000 displaced persons afflicted by the war and unable or unwilling to return home.
This paper discusses the multiple trajectories of survival and post-war relocations of those who were involved in the implementation of the Holocaust during the war, escaped justice under the guise of displaced persons, and immigrated to Australia. It explores the tactics they used in the vetting process to cover up the traces of their wartime activities, as well as the Australian socio-political environment that facilitated their integration into post-war civilian life. Moreover, my research seeks to answer the question of how exile on a distant continent affected their practices of self-representation, reconstruction of war events, the Holocaust, and their participation in them. This paper is part of the broader discussion on the history of fates of Soviet collaborators, presented in the doctoral dissertation, entitled "Tracing the Post-War Fates of Soviet Perpetrators in the USSR, Australia, and the U.S. during the Cold War."

Author

• Aleksandra Riabichenko, U of Melbourne (Australia)