A Nazi flag hangs on one side of the hall, the Australian flag on the other. Between them, a floral arrangement lines the steps leading to a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler above which a sign in German says “50 years”.
Who took the photograph inside a German club in Adelaide on 20 April 1939 is not known but more than 80 years later the image of the decorations laid out to mark Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday is a reminder of an episode in Australia’s history now barely remembered.
Many of the details have been lost: how many people attended, who they were and what speeches they gave at the podium draped in a swastika.
What is known is that the decorations were overseen by Ilma Bohlmann (née Menzel), an Australian citizen and Nazi sympathiser, who during the war denounced members of the German community for their disloyalty to Hitler’s dictatorship.
The photo is not the only record of Nazi activity in Australia in the years before the second world war, when a small but determined network sought to expand the party’s influence among German migrants and others across the country.
Others that survive show a cheerful group on the steps of the Carrington Hotel in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba, and a solemn scene at a German memorial for first world war victims in Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery.
The historian Barbara Poniewierskihas mapped out the activities of these groups and built a list of every known Nazi party member in Australia that included their membership number – an important piece of evidence to challenge any later claims that they had no involvement.
“Nothing happened to them after the war,” she says. “They went back to their farms, back to their work. Thought they got away with it. Which they did, I suppose.
“But they left a legacy of shame that reflects on the rest of the German community [in South Australia]. Unfairly, because most of them were loyal.”
Recruitment drive
Today the Barossa in SA is known for shiraz and picturesque views, but more than half a century ago the close-knit German community of Tanunda served as the launching point for the Nazi party’s effort to expand in Australia.
This work was organised Dr Johannes Heinrich Becker, a first world war veteran who arrived in Australia in 1927.
Becker joined the party on 1 March 1932, about a year after he was asked by a member of the Reichstag to set up local branches in Australia.
From Tanunda, Becker coordinated with his counterpart in Sydney, Johannes Frerck, the owner of a continental deli in Darlinghurst. Frerck and his wife, Elsa Bachman, had joined the party together in 1925, only a few years after its formation. His membership number was 9,028 and hers 9,029.
As membership was reserved for German citizens, and the party leadership was hesitant to admit those living overseas, the earlier a person joined the more trusted they would be.
Though his membership lapsed – either for financial reasons or because of a personal grudge – Frerck’s status as one of the first 10,000 meant he was considered an “old fighter”, earning him clout.
Together Frerck and Becker began to recruit, setting up branches in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and quickly planning a takeover of the German clubs in each major city.
Two German clubs operated in SA, one for working-class members whose politics leaned socialist and one on Adelaide’s Pirie Street, whose members typically belonged to the upper middle class.
The Pirie Street club was targeted for takeover and, though an attempt was made to resist, it became a focal point for Nazi organising in the state.
With only 12 members each, the two Nazi party branches in SA were smaller than their Sydney and Melbourne counterparts but potentially more influential, thanks to the large German community in and around Adelaide.
Another organisation was created for Australian citizens who could not join the party, initially called the Friends of the Hitler Movement but later tactfully renamed the Club for Further Education.
Becker is believed to have taken the group photo with the earliest members of the Adelaide Nazi party branch in front of a vineyard along Gomersal Road in Tanunda in about 1934.
Those present include Pinaroo storekeeper Carl Christoph Fienemann, Ernst Emil Starke, Karl Johan Rohde (a visiting member of the Brisbane branch), stonemason Heinrich Wallenstein, Wilhelm Friedrich Abel, Walter Ernst Bartsch, Harry Hahn and Oluf Bohlens.
The photo was later be passed to Australian intelligence, and those who had not returned to Germany were interned during the war.
As national branch leader for the Australian party, Becker was also made the head of the Gestapo in Australia. Though he did not have the powers of a police officer, the position meant that even the German consul general, Rudolf Asmis, had to consult with him on certain issues.
The Gestapo in Australia operated under the innocuous name of the Harbour Service and their official role was to entertain German sailors in port.
In fact they were watching visiting Germans, running background checks on those applying for visas to return home and reporting on German-Jewish refugees.
There is at least one recorded instance of a sailor who complained about the dictatorship while visiting his brother in Tanunda being arrested on his return to Germany.
The power quickly went to Becker’s head and a feud with Asmis eventually erupted into public abuse. Asmis thought Becker mentally ill and a tyrant; Becker considered Asmis low class and a careerist of questionable loyalty. The clash ended when Asmis had Becker removed from his post.
By 1938 the organisation had been restructured, with some branches dissolved. In 1939, after an SS officer, Alfred Henschel, took charge of the Australian Nazi party, records obtained by Australian intelligence services show there were 177 paying members across the country, including 33 women.
The list was found by new tenants under the kitchen lino of a Sydney flat that once belonged to the party’s treasurer, who had hidden it there before being interned.
Coverage of the Nazis by the Australian press generally focused on what was happening in Germany rather than locally, and ranged widely in tone, sliding into outright propaganda at times.
A 1934 article in the Adelaide evening paper the News headlined “Hitler does not want warfare”, maintained that “Hitler has the whole of Germany on his side in as far as he was able to free the German people from the intellectual domination of the Jew”.
As war became certain the mood changed decisively and sympathisers in Australia came under more scrutiny, culminating in glowing coverage of police raids on party members across Australia, who were described in the Sydney Sun as “Goebbels’ agents”.
‘So much treachery’
From 1933 the Australian government made efforts to keep an eye on the Nazis, dispatching two spies to monitor the community in Tanunda.
The first was Sergeant Otto Bieri, a Swiss who had previously reported on Nazi activity in New Guinea. After an “indiscretion” exposed his work, he was replaced by a pastor, Luis Alfred Tepper.
Working under the codename “A4”, Tepper and his family became accepted as Nazi sympathisers and he generated detailed reports about covert activities during the war, though it came at a personal cost – his son was taught to heil Hitler and draw swastikas.
He wrote with sympathy about the town’s only Jewish resident, who did not know what was said about him in private, and how Lutheran pastors, particularly those involved with the United Evangelical Lutheran church, were Nazi sympathisers.
“What impressed me was he was so outraged and heartbroken at what he found in Tanunda,” Poniewierski says. “He was Australian-born, but of German descent. And he couldn’t believe there was so much treachery there.”
As the war drew to a close Tepper, who died a “retired school teacher” in 2006, could foresee how the story would end.
In his reports he wrote how outspoken Nazis and their supporters would “crawl and cringe to the world pleading their innocence and saying they never harboured any sentiments of disloyalty”.
“These people at and around Tanunda will get away with the whole rotten show,” he said.
Tepper’s prediction was accurate. After the war an inquiry was held to determine what should happen to party supporters who had been interned, with the Argus in Melbourne reporting a judge’s view that Friederich Wilhelm Heim was “as Nazi as ever”.
Some ended up like Becker, who was deported in 1947 and died in Germany in 1961. Others who had been Nazi sympathisers, but not necessarily party members, simply faded back into the community.
In one instance, a man who had threatened to shoot his sons if they enlisted to fight against Germany began using their service on behalf of the Allies to demonstrate his Australian patriotism.
Much later an effort would be made to rewrite history and claim Germans had faced persecution, although just 21 native-born Germans in SA were interned at the start of the war – a fraction of the 20,000 living in the state.
The journalist Mark Aarons, author of War Criminals Welcome, says the story continued along familiar lines in the decades after the war. Some German Nazis and collaborators from eastern Europe found a new home in Australia, and Aarons says he confirmed a group of ex-SS officers set up a clandestine organisation in SA to keep their ideology alive.
Aarons says successive Australian governments sought to avoid asking too many questions about the past, as many former Nazis and their collaborators went on to be recruited by intelligence services during the cold war, or became involved in politics.
“As far as I’m concerned, the cover-up continued until the 1990s,” Aarons says. “It all goes back to that extraordinary photo from 1939, which really illustrates how Australian politics didn’t care about the Nazis.
“A gathering of Nazis in 1939, celebrating Hitler’s birthday, was not an exceptional thing at all.”
