Nazis Find an Aussie Sanctuary

Over the past 18 years, one country after another chased out Konrad Kalejs, first the United States, then Canada and Britain.

Judges in Chicago and Toronto ruled that Kalejs was an officer in a notorious Nazi unit that exterminated thousands of Jews during World War II and guarded concentration camps in his native Latvia.

But Kalejs always knew there was one place he could live in peace: his adopted homeland, Australia.

Over the past decade, Kalejs has become the poster child for Australian tolerance of suspected Nazi war criminals. As other democratic countries have sought to keep out Kalejs and his kind, Australia has gained a reputation as a haven.

Now, at 87, Kalejs is about to test the limits of Australian leniency.

In September, Latvia charged Kalejs with genocide for his alleged role in killing Jews during World War II. The Baltic nation requested Kalejs’ extradition, and Australian police arrested him Dec. 13 at his home here. Kalejs, who denies any part in war crimes, was released after agreeing not to leave Australia. Officials expect him to contest extradition in a court tussle that could last two years.

If the Australian courts agree to hand over Kalejs, it would be a first.

“Australia remains the only Western country to which numerous Nazi war criminals emigrated after World War II that has never taken action against a single one,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. “There has never been a conviction on criminal charges, there has never been a denaturalization or a deportation or an expulsion or an extradition.”

Perhaps it is Australia’s origin as a penal colony that has made its people willing to overlook the past. Or maybe it is the continent’s distance from the horrors of World War II Europe. But after unsuccessful efforts in the early 1990s to put three war crimes suspects on trial, Australia gave up trying.

In Canberra, the capital, Justice Minister Amanda Vanstone said that Australia has adopted tough war crimes laws but that the standard of proof required for a conviction can be difficult in cases where the incidents occurred long ago in another country.

Furthermore, naturalized Australians such as Kalejs cannot be stripped of their citizenship and deported for lying their way into the country as long as they held their citizenship for 10 years before 1997, when the law was changed.

“Everybody would like people who are war criminals to be in jail--everybody I know anyway,” Vanstone said. “With respect, it’s not always one person’s fault or one country’s fault. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want.”

After War, Nazis Lied to Gain Entry

Australia fought on the side of the Allies during World War II, primarily against Japan in the Pacific. After the war, the continent opened its borders to refugees from war-torn Europe, including survivors of the Holocaust. In theory, Nazi war criminals were denied entry, but hundreds lied about their past, won permission to immigrate and eventually became naturalized citizens. Australia was not alone; hundreds entered the U.S., Canada and Britain in the same way.

In Australia, charges began surfacing as early as the 1950s that war criminals had gained sanctuary, but for decades no serious investigation was carried out. Most of the Nazi immigrants lived out their lives and died in peaceful obscurity.

In 1986, Sydney journalist Mark Aarons produced a series of reports documenting the presence of Nazi war criminals in Australia. He found that the nation’s intelligence agents knowingly let war criminals enter the country because of the Nazis’ staunch opposition to communism, which was perceived in the postwar climate as a greater threat than fascism.

His reports prompted the government to examine its record, and in 1987 it established the Special Investigations Unit to collect evidence and prepare charges against war crime suspects.

Robert Greenwood, the unit’s first director, said the agency investigated 880 suspects and found evidence implicating more than 200 in serious war crimes, although by then many had died.

Despite Evidence, Cases Dropped

Australia’s independent Department of Public Prosecutions agreed to bring three of the unit’s cases to trial. A judge threw out the first for lack of evidence. The second ended in acquittal. Prosecutors abandoned the third after the defendant had a heart attack. Despite evidence against dozens more--including Kalejs--the government shut down the Special Investigations Unit in mid-1992, citing lack of success in winning convictions and the high cost of pursuing cases.

In contrast, the U.S. created the Office of Special Investigations within the Justice Department in 1979 and adopted a strategy of denaturalizing and deporting suspects for lying at the time they entered the country. So far, the office has stripped 64 of their citizenship and removed 53 after they were accused of being Nazis. Seventeen cases are in the courts and more will be filed this year, said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the office.

One of the most infamous suspects living in Australia is Karlis Ozols.

Like Kalejs, he was allegedly a lieutenant in the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian unit organized by the Germans that killed an estimated 30,000 Jews, Gypsies and suspected communists. By some accounts, every member of the unit participated in the killings. The unit was named for its leader, Viktor Arajs, who was caught in Germany after the war and sentenced to life in prison, where he died.

According to witnesses and documents, Ozols led a Kommando company that killed 12,000 Jews in Belarus. He allegedly ordered his men to carry out mass killings and shot some victims himself.

After the war, he immigrated to Australia and was naturalized as a citizen. In 1958, he became the national chess champion and later traveled abroad representing the country at tournaments.

The Special Investigations Unit was on the verge of completing its case against Ozols when the government pulled the plug on all of its investigations. Later, officials declined to reopen the case, citing a lack of funds.

Now 88, Ozols is in failing health and lives in a Melbourne nursing home. Asked by a reporter about the Arajs Kommando, Ozols breathed heavily and moaned, but said nothing.

At the Ozols’ home nearby, his wife, Erika, blamed Jews for the allegations against her husband.

Another war crimes suspect living in Australia is Antanas Gudelis, a native of Lithuania. The Australian investigators found evidence that he commanded a Lithuanian Nazi unit that killed thousands of people in the towns of Kupiskis and Kaunas.

Now 89, nearly deaf and suffering from heart problems, he lives in the city of Adelaide, where he declines to discuss his past. His wife, Jude, also blames Jews for raising the charges against her husband but concedes that they could be correct. She said she has never asked her husband. “I cannot say guilty or not guilty,” she said. “I hope it’s not true.”

Alleged Child-Killer Dies a Free Man

One of the biggest disappointments for Australian investigators was the case of Heinrich Wagner, a member of a Nazi police unit in the Ukraine. Wagner allegedly took part in the extermination of more than 120 people in the village of Izraylovka.

After learning of his presence in Australia, investigators traveled to Ukraine and found witnesses who said Wagner helped arrest and shoot 104 Jews in the village in 1942. After the slaughter, the witnesses alleged, Wagner rounded up 19 half-Jewish children ages 4 months to 11 years and shot them. He tossed one toddler into the air and opened fire as the child fell, they said.

Based on the statements of the witnesses, the Australians exhumed the mass grave and found the skeletons of 19 children.

The government was about to put Wagner on trial in 1993 when he suffered a heart attack. Doctors testified that his chances of recovery were “remote” and that a trial could kill him. Prosecutors dropped the case. Apparently, they never checked to see if his condition had improved.

In December 1999, the ABC news program “20/20” visited Wagner’s home in Adelaide and videotaped him in seemingly good health, working in his garden and carrying in bags of groceries from his car. Still, the government took no action.

Wagner died last November at age 78.

“We had a very good case against Wagner,” Greenwood recalled. “There are lots of people who have health problems who are still brought to justice. It’s pathetic.”

Justice Minister Vanstone, however, defended the government’s conduct in the cases of Wagner, Ozols, Gudelis and Kalejs.

“They have been handled according to the proper processes,” she said. “People may wish in their heart of hearts that more evidence could have been found and they could have been prosecuted. But wishing is not the reality of what you have to present in court.”

If Kalejs had stayed put in Australia, he would likely have gone unnoticed by the outside world.

Kalejs entered Australia in 1950 after telling immigration officials that he had been a farmer and student during the war.

Soon after, the former Nazi officer was hired as a clerk at Australia’s main refugee camp, where his job was to issue identity papers to new immigrants.

Kalejs was naturalized as a citizen in 1957. Using his new Australian passport, he left in 1959 for the United States, where his mother and sister had moved after the war. He remained there for 35 years, where investigators say he made a fortune in real estate.

In 1982, U.S. officials began looking into allegations that Kalejs had committed war crimes. Six years later, immigration Judge Anthony Petrone ordered Kalejs deported for lying about his past when he entered the United States.

The judge concluded that Kalejs had joined the Arajs Kommando as a lieutenant in July 1941 and served in the unit during the period it committed mass killings. He also determined that Kalejs was in charge of guards at the Porkhov, Salaspils and Sauriesi concentration camps, where Jews and other prisoners were starved, tortured, executed and worked to death.

Kalejs appealed, and it took another six years before the government won. He was finally deported to Australia in 1994.

Later that year, the Canadian government learned that Kalejs had taken up residence in Toronto and began deportation proceedings.

In 1997, Immigration and Refugee Board Adjudicator Anthony Iozzo ordered Kalejs deported after concluding that he was an officer of the Arajs Kommando and in charge of guards at the three concentration camps. Like Petrone, Iozzo found no direct evidence that Kalejs was involved in specific killings, but said he was an accomplice to acts of murder, enslavement and torture.

Once again, Kalejs was deported to Australia. Not content to remain down under, he flew to Los Angeles four months later. He was sent back to Australia on the next flight.

Kalejs later traveled to Britain and took up residence in a retirement home in Rugby. His presence there was made public in December 1999 by “20/20.” An embarrassed British government quickly ordered him returned to Australia.

When Kalejs returned from Britain last January, Australian officials provided a car to whisk him past reporters at the airport.

Kalejs Is Expected to Plead He Is Too Sick

In a rare interview with SBS radio in Australia shortly after his return, Kalejs acknowledged commanding men who had served in the Arajs Kommando but denied any part in killing civilians. “I have never participated in anything like that,” he said.

Kalejs now lives at the Latvian Village Retirement Hostel in a suburb of Melbourne. He is said to stay fit by swimming and is occasionally seen going for walks. The manager of the complex screens all of Kalejs’ visitors and refuses entry to any who are uninvited. “He won’t talk to anybody, so that’s the end of it,” said the manager, who refused to give his name.

Kalejs’ extradition hearing is scheduled to begin Jan. 25. Like other elderly people accused of war crimes, he is expected to plead that he is too sick to be sent abroad to stand trial.

Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, said illness and old age are no excuse for not prosecuting those accused of genocide. “We say, learn from the Wagner case,” Rubenstein said. “It is important for Australia’s integrity and image that we get one run on the board.”