Fascists in Exile: Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia

By Jayne Persian.

Fascists in Exile tells the extraordinary story of the war criminals, collaborators and fascist ultranationalists who were resettled in Australia by the International Refugee Organisation between 1947 and 1952.

It explores the far-right backgrounds and continuing political activism of these displaced persons in Australia, adding to our knowledge of the development of Australian anti-communism in the 1950s. These individuals argued that they had been caught between National Socialism and Soviet communism. What might that have meant for their migration and resettlement trajectories? Beyond ‘Nazi-hunting’, what can this tell us about the challenge they posed to international and national forms, both in Europe and in Australia? This book demonstrates that fascist ideation could not only survive the war’s end but that it continued to be transnational and transcultural. At the same time, anti-fascist protests and then the war crimes investigations of the late 1980s exposed problematic pasts, a legacy with which Australia is still reckoning.

Jayne Persian is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland. She is author of Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (2017) and co-editor of Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia (Routledge, 2022). Her research predominantly focuses on Central and Eastern Europe displaced persons, many of whom migrated to Australia in the post-war period.

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