There was something tragic about all the old men who entered the conference room. The handful of survivors were better dressed than the killers, most of whom were obviously worn by the physical and emotional stress of many years spent in prison for their part in the Nazi Holocaust.Victims and murderers must have crossed paths as they came to the Riga office of the Procurator of the then Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic to be interviewed by the reporter from Australia. Perhaps some met in the waiting room outside, or crossed the cold, wintry street together. I could see the terrible pain on the survivors' faces, as they struggled to bear witness about indescribable acts of inhumanity. A few of the killers also had pain in their eyes, and some even expressed what seemed like genuine contrition. Most, however, recounted what they had seen and done in a mechanical monologue; refusing even after more than 20 years of prison, to accept personal responsibility.
It did not matter. All that counted were their recollections of men in far off Australia. Repeatedly, the witnesses pointed their fingers at a long-time resident of Melbourne, whose investigation for war crimes was dropped in 1992 by the then Federal Attorney General, Michael Duffy, despite the recommendation of the government's war crimes unit that he should be prosecuted - a recommendation that was supported by senior QC and former National Crimes Authority head, Peter Faris.
While many small players have paid the price for their actions, one of their commanders, Karlis Ozols, lives in Melbourne, playing chess, working with the Australian wing of an international group, Daugavas Vanagi (the Hawks of Daugavas, named after the main Latvian river). Made up of 1,200 members at its peak, the local Hawks are an organisation of former Latvian SS men in Australia.
Karlis Ozols was not yet 30 when the Germans marched into Latvia in July 1941. A former law student at Riga University, he was well known as a chess player of international standard and had travelled widely in Europe to play in major competitions. Within a year, the then tall and slender young man was a member of a brutally efficient SS killing machine, the Arajs Kommando. Ozols' activities between July 1941, when the Nazis arrived in Latvia, and March 1942 when he can definitely be traced to a Nazi SD (Security Police) training school in Germany where he learned the fine points of mass murder, cannot be accounted for precisely. The Australian war crimes investigators of the Special Investigations Unit received a number of allegations that Ozols had been active in this period in mass shootings of the thousands of civilians herded into the Jewish ghetto in Riga.
By some accounts Ozols was active in slaughtering Jews from the Riga ghetto in the Bikinieki forest, a site notorious in this period as the "role model" for the techniques adopted at similar mass exterminations throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Other accounts place him at the site of similar mass murders in and around Liepaja in the second half of 1941.
The Australian war crimes investigators could only establish a circumstantial case for such claims. They, like me before them, picked up Karlis Ozols' trail in the little German town of Furstenberg in early 1942.
Janis Prieditis was one of Ozols' former comrades who I met and interviewed in Riga in early 1987. Prieditis had first met Ozols at Furstenberg, just near Ravensbruck where the Third Reich operated one of its many concentration camps. It was an appropriate place for the site of the special police academy, as it was adjacent to a fine example of what was expected of Furstenberg's students. The school's purpose was not to train men in preventing and solving crimes, but in organising them on a mass scale.
The Latvian police were to be trained in what were known euphemistically as "security matters." In fact, Furstenberg was a school run by the infamous SD, the security service of Heinrich Himmler's SS. It had only two purposes. The first was to prepare men for mass murder. The second was to train them for the merciless anti-partisan war fought against those opposed to the Germans.
The men who were recruited for training at Furstenberg invariably shared one thing in common: they had already served the Third Reich in the early mass exterminations of Jews, Gypsies, communists and other Nazi opponents that had begun soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941. The reward for services rendered was to be sent to SD schools like Furstenberg for advanced studies in mass murder.
This fact alone might support the claim that Karlis Ozols had been active in the Riga ghetto, at Bikinieki forest and Liepaja, as it was the "elite" who had proved themselves in cold blooded killing who progressed to Furstenberg. Once there, Ozols certainly went to the top of the class, emerging a few months later as a Lieutenant in one of the most ruthless and efficient killing squads the Nazis ever assembled on the Eastern Front.
Janis Prieditis was 65 years old when I met him in 1987, and like most of his old comrades, showed his years of imprisonment clearly on his prematurely aged and lined face. By his own admission, Prieditis had joined Latvia's premier killing squad in February 1942.
The squad was commanded by Viktors Arajs, whose own name later became synonymous with the SD-controlled auxiliary police units which conducted mass executions in and around Riga from 1941 onwards. Arajs was a former student at Riga University, and he recruited the hierarchy of officers who supervised the executions from among his former classmates. The so-called Arajs Kommando became one of the most efficient killing machines in the Baltic area. According to some estimates, tens of thousands of people were murdered by the Furstenberg-trained "security" police. Thirty-five years later, Viktors Arajs was tried in Hamburg, West Germany, charged with war crimes associated with the Kommando. The West German Court convened in Melbourne in October 1979 to take unsworn evidence from Arajs's old friend and colleague, Karlis Ozols, who said he knew nothing at all about atrocities against Jews and Gypsies.
However, when Arajs was found guilty, the Court made a point of dismissing Karlis Ozols' evidence, on the grounds that the Soviets had claimed he was a member of the Arajs Kommando from as early as 1941.
There certainly is no lack of allegations linking Karlis Ozols with the Arajs Kommando. In early 1942, Karlis Ozols was at the Furtstenberg SD training school. Janis Prieditis was not the only witness who met him there, and to say that he saw him later at the site of mass executions on the Eastern Front.
In February 1987, I recorded interviews with four eye witnesses who provided information about Karlis Ozols's role in war crimes. Each had also signed statements on the subject.
In mid-1942, Private Prieditis finished the course at the SD school and was sent to Minsk in neighbouring Byelorussia (today the independent republic of Belarus). He said his company was commanded by Karlis Ozols, and although he claimed to have spent most time guarding the security police and SD headquarters in Minsk, he confessed to playing a small part in mass killings on at least four or five occasions.
According to his claims, the executions were conducted about 20 kilometres outside the city along the main Minsk-Moscow highway, in a pine forest where big pits had been dug.
Prieditis insisted that he had not taken part in the mass shootings at the pits. "I was relatively far away, about 400 metres," he told me. "We had to guard the area so that civilians couldn't have access. The Jews were brought from the ghetto in Minsk on lorries, and when they were unloaded they were brought to the edge of the pit and then shot."
According to his signed statement, the executions started in the morning and went on till after dark. "I know that when I was on guard duty, a total of 10,000 people were shot," Prieditis's statement continued, although he later told me that it could have been as high as 15,000 killed on these four or five occasions alone.
Prieditis was convinced that the man who gave him his orders to guard the site was Karlis Ozols. He was also certain that Ozols was at the mass graves when the killings took place. However, he could not remember whether Ozols personally participated in the shootings.
Neither could another policeman, private Paulius Rudzitis, then 66 years old. He also had been sent to Minsk in mid-1942.
"I remember Karlis Ozols well," Rudzitis said in his signed statement. "He was company commander and his rank was initially lieutenant and then senior lieutenant. At that time Ozols was about 30 years old, rather tall, slim and slender.
"I personally served in the security police and SD company commanded by Ozols from the summer of 1942 to the autumn of 1943."
He said that on one occasion towards the end of his term, he was ordered to guard the site of a mass execution, about twenty kilometres from Minsk. Ordered to stand guard about 200 metres from the grave, Rudzitis said that Karlis Ozols was at the site where the Jews were being shot.
"I did not personally see those who did the shooting, for it was impossible to see them from the place where I did guard duty," he said in his statement. "So I cannot assert that Ozols personally shot Jews who were brought there."
Rudzitis also said he remembered that there were large quantities of vodka available for the police at the mass executions, "as a reward for the shootings." For some, this was undoubtedly because they could not carry out their ghastly work unfortified. For others, it probably was all part of the carnival atmosphere.
Arnold Zuika had a similar story to tell me. He, too, had met his company commander, Karlis Ozols, at the Furstenberg SD school, and was sent to Minsk in autumn 1942. "I took part in many operations to burn villages and arrest inhabitants in the environs of Minsk," he said in his signed statement. "I did all that on orders from Karlis Ozols. We later sent (the) arrested civilians to Minsk.
"Their further fate is not known to me precisely. Some of them may have been released, but most were shot dead. I can assert this because I myself repeatedly participated in guarding the place of shootings of arrested citizens, some 20 to 25 kilometres from Minsk."
Private Zuika said in his statement that he remembered that Senior Lieutenant Ozols was "among the persons who executed peaceful Soviet civilians. He was armed with a sub-machine gun. Usually during such actions, Ozols was a little drunk, because he took alcoholic drinks before executions." When I interviewed Zuika, he told me that "mostly he was already drunk when he arrived. He'd had a drop too much already, and I could see he was using alcohol on the spot."
In his statement, Zuika said mass killings took place "no less than once a week" from autumn 1942 to summer 1943, and that it was Ozols who "would personally appoint some 8 to 15 men from among his subordinates to take part in shootings ... The usual procedure for shooting civilians was as follows: Ozols would receive a list of citizens to be shot from his superiors, the victims would be taken by lorry from their cells in the building of the Minsk security police and SD to a young pine wood, placed on the edge of a pit that was already dug, and shot down. The task of our guard platoon was to secure the place of shooting, against partisans and so on. Pits were dug by Jewish prisoners, who also backfilled the pits after the shootings."
Reinis Libietis was the youngest of the former Nazi policemen I met during my 1987 visit to Riga. He had just turned 64. He had also been at the Furstenberg SD school and then spent about a year serving in Minsk under Ozols.
Unlike the others, Libietis was adamant that he had not taken any part in mass executions, and that he had never witnessed Ozols's involvement in actions of this kind. He confirmed that Ozols was the company commander, held the rank of lieutenant and wore a German uniform.
In his signed statement, Libietis said: "I was ordered to guard the security police and SD building in Minsk, and also sent to guard warehouses outside the city of Minsk, approximately 20 kilometres away, which contained stolen belongings of Jews ... I do know that a number of people from the company under Ozols's command took part in the extermination of Soviet citizens outside Minsk, not far from the warehouse."
Reinis Libietis showed signs of contrition for his actions. While refusing to acknowledge any direct involvement in the Holocaust, he was the only one of the four I interviewed who admitted any wrongdoing. "I was then a young lad," he said in a matter of fact voice. "It was a stupid thing to do ... That was a very difficult time, and now for the rash and stupid mistakes of my youth I have received punishment which I deserved ... I understand that we are speaking about war criminals and that they should be punished."
The Federal Government's now disbanded war crimes unit, the Special Investigations Unit, made Karlis Ozols one of its top priority cases when it began work in the months after I returned from Riga in February 1987. According to its second director, Graham Blewitt, his investigators established beyond doubt that the Karlis Ozols who lives today in Melbourne is the same Karlis Ozols identified by Reinis Libietis, Janis Prieditis, Paulius Rudzitis and Arnold Zuika as their commanding officer in the Latvian killing unit which operated in and around Minsk in 1942 and 1943. The SIU, supported by a QC's opinion, recommended that the Keating government should prosecute Ozols under Australia's War Crimes Act.
In September 1992, the founding director of the SIU, Bob Greenwood, QC, strongly attacked the Keating government's decision to abandon the proposed prosecution of Ozols.
He accused the government of "political hypocrisy" for refusing to grant money for further inquiries. He said a Melbourne Queen's Counsel briefed by the Director of Public Prosecutions had found it was "a good case, subject to a little more investigative work."
Greenwood said the case would have been the biggest "of the lot so far." However under the War Crimes Act, the Attorney-General must clear a prosecution before it goes ahead.
The Keating Cabinet had earlier endorsed a decision by Mr Duffy not to provide funds to investigate new cases, or finalise the investigation of Ozols.
As discussed in the accompanying article in this edition of the Review, the 1992 advice provided by a Melbourne QC to the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Michael Rozenes, has now been revealed. It was written by Peter Faris, a former head of the National Crime Authority.
According to the then head of the government's Nazi-hunting unit, Graham Blewitt, Mr Faris's brief had followed a search warrant executed against Ozols in his Melbourne home.
This warrant had been sworn out after the DPP staff involved in the case had decided that there was a sufficiently powerful case for the investigation to proceed to the next phase. After the investigators had raided Ozols's house, Rozenes briefed Peter Faris to provide formal advice on whether a prima facie case existed to prosecute him for war crimes.
Faris and the DPP staff involved in the case then spent a week with Blewitt's team, reviewing the evidence and sifting through the further leads that required investigation. The material before Faris included the evidence of the four eye witnesses I interviewed in Riga in 1987, and the testimony of an additional five witnesses who the SIU team had tracked down and interviewed. Furthermore, Faris had access to original documents about Ozols wartime activities as a member of both the Arajs Kommando and the SS. These included at least one document that implicated Ozols by name in a major mass shooting of civilians.
Even more important, Faris was aware that Canadian war crimes investigators, who had been collecting evidence on Arajs Kommando members in their own country, had obtained unprecedented access to former Soviet KGB files which indicated that other eye witnesses were available who could provide further damning testimony against Karlis Ozols. According to Graham Blewitt, it was established that at least two of these witnesses were still alive in Riga in 1992.
Peter Faris strongly recommended to the DPP that the Ozols investigation should be pursued, so that these and other potential witnesses could be interviewed, and the material already collected could be compiled into the form required for a "hand-up brief" under Victorian law.
Graham Blewitt is now the Deputy Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is investigating and trying war criminals from the recent Bosnian and Croatian conflicts. According to Blewitt, after the Director of Public Prosecutions, Michael Rozenes, received Faris's opinion he initially took the view that a prima facie case had been established, and that the Ozols investigation should proceed to determine whether charges of genocide should be laid under the War Crimes Act.
Graham Blewitt is certain that the Ozols prosecution was abandoned because the Keating Government had decided that it wanted nothing more to do with war crimes. "There were no votes in old Nazis." The senior officials of the Attorney General's Department who were manipulating the case in this bureaucratic twilight were determined that the Special Investigations Unit would close on 30 June 1992 "come what may." For the bureaucrats, the Ozols case was an inconvenient footnote to four decades of official indifference and cover-up, and threatened the neat solution which the SIU's disbandment promised for their closed minds.
In the end, the same gray, bureaucratic caste that had stymied war crimes investigations in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s had their way in the 1990s. As in earlier years, they could not have done so without the active collaboration of their political masters who were only too keen to end Australia's belated war crimes investigations. Attorney General Duffy went so far as to direct Graham Blewitt that he could make no public comment about the work of the Special Investigations Unit, or even about war crimes in general. He was even ordered not to speak to anyone who might possibly make a public comment.
The decision to abandon the Ozols case was merely another chapter in the 50 year history of official indifference to identifying and prosecuting former Nazis now living in Australia.
The first ships carrying migrants under the Displaced Persons Scheme, which berthed in late 1947 and early 1948, were carrying a number of men who had served in the Latvian SS Divisions. More Baltic Nazis arrived over the next four years.
Australia's intelligence organisation (then called the Commonwealth Investigation Service) investigated and then suggested that such people be excluded from the privilege of becoming Australians. Then Labor Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, angrily described their report as "a farrago of nonsense," and warned that action over Nazis would damage his immigration program. Since then, Federal Ministers on both sides of politics have taken little action on the issue. Perhaps they have been concerned by claims that Australia's Western allies, particularly Britain and the United States, had used Australia as a dumping ground for their Nazi intelligence agents, and that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was an active partner.
It is ironic that while the collapse of Communism has prompted the opening of formerly closed KGB records on Karlis Ozols, Canberra has not yet acknowledged that ASIO had any connection with Nazis in Australia.
Bob Greenwood has persistently claimed that ASIO had actively recruited suspected Nazi war criminals during the Cold War years. He said "ASIO had made a lot of use of those fellows. I certainly found bits and pieces which convinced me they did use some of them after they got here. "A number of people were identified whom ASIO had used as agents because they were obviously right-wing, strong anti-communists. These agents joined up with various immigrant organisations to keep an eye on the lefties. The security people who did try to stop some of these people coming into Australia were snowed by the Immigration Department, whose policy was to fill up the ships. But once they were here, ASIO made use of them. We ended up with hundreds and hundreds of them."
In his 1986 inquiry into claims that ASIO protected and recruited Nazis, a former senior official of the Attorney-General's Department, Andrew Menzies, cleared ASIO of any role in helping war criminals enter Australia, although he did find that Nazi suspects had provided information to the security service once they were here. He also found that serious limitations in Australia's immigration and vetting systems had allowed suspected war criminals to slip into Australia.
Fifty years later, the system has improved only slightly. A mountain of evidence exists that mass murderers who served under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge have evaded the contemporary vetting system, along with members of the Khad, the former security police of the communist regime in Afghanistan, the Chilean Dina, East Germany's Stasi and from many other dictatorships, both of the right and left. There is no doubt that war criminals from the recent conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia are now living in Australia, but Canberra's law enforcement officials seem mystified at such claims. Australia has international obligations under the Geneva Convention on Genocide. This commits the government to enact legislation so that war criminals can be brought before our courts and tried. If cases like that against Karlis Ozols, and his old comrade from the Arajs Kommando, Konrad Kalejs, are not pursued, then a message is sent overseas - Australia is a safe sanctuary.
Reinis Libietis, Janis Prieditis, Paulius Rudzitis and Arnold Zuika all spent many years in prison for their relatively minor parts in the Nazis' mass extermination program in and around Minsk in 1942 and 1943.
In Melbourne, Karlis Ozols, now nearly 85 years old, lives a quiet life. Unlike the privates I met in Riga in 1987, it seems that he will never be brought to justice.
Mark Aarons' book Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia, documents the history of the war crimes issue. His reports on war criminals led to the Menzies Inquiry.
Copyright © 1997 J.O.I.N.