Operation Matchbox, or "There's never a ban for the privileged"

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Has this ever been mentioned here?


   > UK arranged transfer of Nazi scientists to Australia

Britain secretly organised the recruitment and transfer to Australia of 
scores of leading Nazi scientists and weapons specialists after the 
second world war, newly declassified Australian government papers 
disclosed yesterday.

The German scientists sent to Australia under a top secret 
Anglo-American project codenamed Operation Matchbox included SS and Nazi 
party members. The leading Nazi-hunting watchdog, the Simon Wiesenthal 
Centre in Jerusalem, yesterday demanded an investigation into the 
recruitments ordered by Britain and the US, and said Australia was a 
haven for "holocaust perpetrators and mass murderers".

According to documents obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald, the 
British government decided within four months of the end of the war to 
poach "a limited number of German scientists and technicians… on defence 
research to develop military potential at Germany's expense."

The Anglo-American moves, at the onset of the Cold War, were also 
sparked by fears that Stalin's Soviet Union would kidnap the weapons 
specialists if they remained in Germany.

The scientists were sent to Australia despite a blanket ban on Germans 
entering the country at the time.

"There's never a ban for the privileged," said Herbert Schneider, an 
investigating magistrate at Germany's main Nazi-hunting centre in 
Ludwigsburg. "The Americans in particular were recruiting scientists in 
Thuringen and Saxony-Anhalt at the end of the war to prevent them being 
taken to Russia."

In a statement issued in Jerusalem yesterday, the Wiesenthal centre 
demanded an official inquiry into the activities of the Nazi scientists 
in Australia in the late 1940s and 50s. According to press reports in 
Sydney and Melbourne, at least 127 German scientists and engineers were 
sent to Australia between 1946 and 1951. They included 31 Nazi party 
members and six members of the elite SS.

One was said to have been a senior German official in Nazi-occupied 
Poland. Others were experts with IG Farben, the notorious chemicals 
giant which exploited tens of thousands of slave labourers.

The disclosures contradicted an Australian government study of 1986 
which noted that scientists were barred "if they were considered 
unacceptable due to their association with the Nazi party".

The Wiesenthal centre said: The failure of the Australian government to 
deal with this issue is a continuing source of pain for the survivors 
and their relatives."

Mr Schneider said he suspected "some of these people" were war 
criminals, but he could not be sure without the names of individuals and 
details of specific alleged offences. "Many people were recruited by the 
Americans in those years who had nothing to do with war crimes."

Confidential diplomatic traffic between the British and the Australian 
high commission in London after the war showed that London had drawn up 
a recruitment list of 120 German scientists within a year of the war's 
end. The Kremlin had pledged not to enlist Germans with Nazi 
backgrounds, but was failing to honour that pledge.

"Both the US and the UK are planning to prevent this moving of German 
scientists and technicians eastwards since it would increase 
significantly the war potential of Russia," said an Australian 
government telegram.

The experts sent to Australia included the chief of the Messerschmitt 
jet aircraft factory and a nuclear physicist engaged in atomic research 
for the German military, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which 
named no names. The scientists were given special security clearance to 
work on missile research and weapon development.

Two of the Germans worked on Australia's guided missile rocket tests at 
Woomera in the 1950s, while 10 worked in government defence 
laboratories, the newspaper said.

Australian Jewish organisations joined the calls for an official inquiry.

"It is a deplorable and shocking revelation that fully paid-up Nazi 
party members, including those who belonged to Nazi killing units, were 
permitted to enter Australia and start new lives, often at taxpayers' 
expense," said Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the 
Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. <

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/aug/17/iantraynor


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