The Hunt for the Last Nazis review: grim but gripping TV

It’s no secret that after World War II, hundreds of Nazi war criminals made their way to Australia. The big question The Hunt for the Last Nazis asks is, how did they get away with it? Letting Nazis into the country isn’t exactly a vote-winner; if it was an open secret, why did successive governments time and time again fail to act?

The obvious defence is that they didn’t. In the 80s, in the wake of an ABC series exposing the Nazis living in Australia, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke commissioned an inquiry, which led to the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) being launched in 1987. They had a list of 841 names to investigate; five years later the unit was closed down without securing a single conviction.

Their case files form the centre of documentary maker and Walkley Award-winner Dan Goldberg’s investigation into that attempt to bring these war criminals to justice. It’s a grim chapter in Australian history that shouldn’t be forgotten, and this gripping examination will hopefully go some way towards achieving that aim.

Last Nazis: White Australia policy

The news is bad right from the start: Australia might have fought the Axis Powers, but due to the White Australia policy it turned out that Nazis – specifically those from Eastern Europe – were at the top of the list when it came to choosing migrants in the post-war era. It seems that when a big slice of the country is racist, Nazis might be a vote-winner after all.

Goldberg is a hands-on story-teller, and his habit of providing narration while travelling from place to place, or of showing us meeting with his sources, helps to enliven a story that largely takes place in the past in the pages of historical documents.

That’s not to say the story he uncovers isn’t a compelling one. The sheer scale of what took place is staggering. This wasn’t a case where a small number of war criminals snuck in during a period of mass migration; we’re talking at least hundreds and possibly thousands of examples.

Last Nazis: a focus on three men

Out of all this, Goldberg focuses on three: Karlis Ozols, alleged to have been the highest-ranked Nazi in Australia; Konrads Kalejs, accused of helping murder some 10,000 Jews in Riga, and most notably Ivan Polyukhovich, who who spent almost three decades working on the Adelaide docks and was suspected to have been involved in the massacre of over 800 people.

These weren’t men running death camps. Rather, they were part of what’s known as the ‘Holocaust by bullets’. The massacre Polyukhovich was involved in was a mass shooting – the kind of thing that was common in the stretches of Eastern Europe controlled by the Nazis, and which continued right up until the end of World War II.

The upside from the creation of the SIU is that they gathered a large amount of information – including audio and video interviews with the suspects. Goldberg was able to access these never-before-seen (or heard) records and government files for this documentary (‘anything that’s confidential I’m into’ he tells the historian with the archives) hammering home just how big the problem was, and how little was done to resolve it.

Last Nazis: a historical thriller of sorts

The Hunt for the Last Nazis operates as a historical thriller of sorts, as Goldberg works his way through a mystery where each answered question raises another across decades filled with pleas for action and government cover-ups. He starts out with a lack of cynicism that’s required to go through the required steps; if he simply expected the worst, he could probably just jump to the end.

That end being the trial of Ivan Polyukhovich in the early 90s. As the single example where the SIU managed to bring someone to trial, there was a lot riding on the case. It’s hardly a spoiler for a 35-year-old public court case to reveal the SIU didn’t come out winners, and Polyukhovich – who had claimed he was too frail to face justice – lived out his final years outside of prison walls.

As Goldberg makes clear, a big part of the problem was that, after almost half a century and with the crimes taking place half a world away, putting any war criminals on trial in Australia was bound to be a massive task. The Australian justice system simply wasn’t set up to handle such a complex task; after decades where officials refused to do anything, this final defeat is a bitter pill to swallow.

Despite their failure, it was something those involved felt had to be done. War criminals couldn’t just run off to another country and hide; there had to be at least some attempt at bringing them to justice. This occasionally grim but always enthralling documentary is a reminder that the effort was worth making, even if it was too little too late – and if there’s ever a next time, maybe we should do a better job of it.

The Hunt for the Last Nazis is broadcast on 31 May at 7:30pm on SBS and will be available to stream on SBS On Demand.

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