Complicit Testimonies in the Australian Investigative Archive

A Special Investigations Unit (SIU) in Australia was established in 1987 to find evidence of war crimes as defined in the recently amended War Crimes Act, to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes committed during the Second World War. These alleged war criminals were predominantly former Central and Eastern European displaced persons (DPs) who had arrived in Australia in the post-war period, many of them complicit in the Holocaust. This late attempt at prosecution occurred in the context of similar moves towards punitive justice in the other main countries of resettlement: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Focusing on the language used by suspects in the interviews that the Special Investigations Unit conducted, this article reads the interviews as an empirical repository of alleged perpetrator testimony that speaks to non-German complicity with the German-led Holocaust.