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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Walter Marsh

‘An extraordinary act of courage’: the Aboriginal activist who protested against Nazi Germany

William Cooper, the Yorta Yorta political activist and community leader.
William Cooper, the Yorta Yorta activist who led a protest against Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews outside the German consulate in Melbourne in 1938. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

One morning in December 1938, Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper led a group of Australian First Nations activists, the Australian Aborigines’ League, on a two-hour march from Footscray to the German consulate on Collins Street.

The wave of violence known as Kristallnacht had swept across Nazi Germany a month earlier and Cooper’s group planned to register their “strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people”.

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