This important and arresting book chronicles the way in which Australia, from 1947 to 1952, imported some 170,000 displaced persons from Europe, a reasonable number of whom were fascists. The striking thing that Jayne Persian (a historian at the University of Southern Queensland) lays bare is the insouciance with which this policy was adopted and the way in which all political parties fell over themselves with enthusiasm for it, though all the main actors were well aware of the influence of fascism among this cohort.
Persian notes that at the end of the war in Europe there were about twelve million ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). Many were displaced because they had fled westwards ahead of the advancing Russian armies, and a considerable number of these persons did so because they had fought with or for the armies of Nazi Germany. At the same time, Australia was adopting a ‘populate or perish’ immigration policy, and the DPs were an immediate and cheap source of immigrants.
Fascists in Exile: Post-war displaced persons in Australia by Jayne Persian
Routledge, $77.99 pb, 192 pp
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