Retribution

Neither Western Australia nor Tasmania has received German immigration to a large extent.

—Dr C. Hennings, University of Freiburg, “The German Settlers of Australia”, Anglo-German Review, August 1937

In his rambling, quasi-autobiographical treatise of 1941, Eucalyptus, the eccentric architect and aesthete W. Hardy Wilson foresaw an Australian future in which Asians occupied the continent north of the Murray, while whites were restricted to points south and especially to Tasmania, where the author had spent the years 1931–35 in self-imposed exile amongst a stock he praised for their untainted strain of “British” blood. Puzzling as it may seem that someone would journey to Tasmania in search of racial purity, there was nevertheless a serious side to this prospect of alien occupation of the continent, even if it was not as mortifying to Wilson, a cultural Sinophile, as to other white Australians of his generation. The controversial “Brisbane Line” would have seemed a bed of roses by comparison.

The racial fear and loathing generated during the gold rushes and nourished beyond had been little eased by the popular transference of focus from China to Japan after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05. Even the Japanese alignment with the allied cause during the Great War failed to soothe a sense of insecurity that persisted through the 1920s and 1930s, despite the considerable efforts of appeasement directed at Tokyo and the “Near North” by the Lyons and Menzies governments, 1932–41. These efforts had come to nought towards the end of 1941, when John Latham, the Australian minister in Tokyo and one of the architects of Eastern appeasement, returned home empty-handed.

We all know the sequel, exaggerated though it has been in recent movies like Australia. What is not widely known is the attitude of Japan’s chief associate, Germany, in the great struggle that ensued after Pearl Harbor, December 1941, and the dramatic, official response that was formulated in Berlin once the prospect of a Japanese occupation of at least part of the Australian continent seemed a realistic one.[i] It was a response that would have impacted on one particular part of the continent, Tasmania, with devastating effect had the Axis powers been victorious throughout that pivotal year of 1942. Dr Hennings of Freiburg, who had toured Australia in the mid-thirties as a Nazi propagandist, had noted in 1937 the low level of German immigration to Tasmania, unaware that this trickle could soon be converted to a tsunami designed to sweep away Hardy Wilson’s adopted islanders forever.

I

The Anti-Comintern Pact of November 1936 had brought Berlin and Tokyo into alignment in their hostility towards the Soviet Union and its ideology, but the relationship was not close, comfortable or co-ordinated, whether in peace or war. The new Germany, with its ultra-consciousness of race, was certainly not a natural ally of Asia’s foremost power, however much the more eccentric Nazis like Himmler admired, and imitated, the code of bushido. Their enemies were common—at first international communism then the Anglo-Saxons—but race proved an obstacle that German national socialism could hardly overcome. Although Hitler had shown no hesitation in declaring war on the United States within days of Pearl Harbor, he watched with discomfort as Europeans were besieged in Hong Kong, Malaya and the Philippines within weeks. “How strange,” he observed in his Table Talk, “that with Japan’s aid we are destroying the positions of the white race in the Far East.” By the end of January 1942, once Malaya had fallen and Singapore itself was under threat, Propaganda Minister Goebbels noted in his diary that his leader’s sense of disturbance had become a lament—it was not only Australian politicians who sniffed the end of the “White Man” in the region. When the Singaporean icon had itself succumbed in February, Hitler’s lament turned to dread and he forbade a shrill press release prepared by his Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop, noting: “Who knows, in the future the Yellow Peril may well be the biggest one for us.”

These misgivings were all expressed behind the closed doors of the new Chancellery, but would not have come as a surprise to more perceptive Australian observers of European politics. Stanley Bruce, former prime minister and now high commissioner in London, had foxily perceived as early, or as late, as December 1938 that Germany could be brought to support diplomatic moves aimed at bolstering China against Japan if the argument was based on the interests of the “white race” in Asia.[ii] This was despite the fact that Berlin had only recently recognised the Japanese puppet of “Manchukuo” and thereby ended a period of diplomatic dithering over the Sino-Japanese conflict by seeming to cast its lot with Tokyo. Although Bruce’s suggestion was ignored by the Foreign Office at Whitehall, his instinct was confirmed by Hitler’s wry Table Talk conclusion of January 1942 that Germany and Japan could enjoy no intimacy: “To the Japanese we have no real link. They are foreign to us in culture and way of life.”

II

Such sentiments would have been manna-from-heaven to Allied propagandists; so too would have been the conclusions that the Nazis drew from Japan’s progress towards Australia via the former German colony of New Guinea. Whatever the arguments of recent times over the “Battle for Australia” (aired to a considerable extent in the columns of Quadrant) the likelihood of an occupation of at least some of the Australian continent caused consternation in distant Berlin and stimulated a policy response designed to circumvent potential conflict with a victorious Japan. At the centre of this initiative was a desire to protect German-Australians, the Volksdeutsche, from the indignity of Asian subjugation. Their numbers remained uncertain and subject to statistical and political manipulation, but it was thought in the Fatherland that they constituted at least 60,000, and perhaps up to 100,000; even more. Accordingly, in July 1942, the German Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt) requested the Deutsches Auslands-Institut in Stuttgart, an institution for the study and advancement of “Germanism” (Deutschtum) abroad, to prepare a report on a means to avoid the indignity of Germans being placed “under the control of a yellow race”, as it was subsequently described. The Institute had been established in 1917, but had fallen progressively under the influence of national socialist ideology in the years from 1933; by 1943 it would be under the aegis of the SS. Dr Heinz Kloss (b. 1904), a DAI departmental head, noted linguist and party member since 1940, soon attended to the request and furnished Die Deutsche Volksgruppe in Australien, an assessment of the future prospects for ethnic Germans (the “Group”) in an Australia that would constitute part of the Japanese “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.[iii] Kloss received the notable assistance of the diplomat “Dr-Dr” Rudolf Asmis (b. 1879) of the “Office for Colonial Policy” of the Nazi party (NSDAP), and of Professor Karl-Heinz Pfeffer (b. 1906), of the University of Berlin and director of the British section of another foreign policy think-tank, the Deutsches Auslandswissenschaftliches Institut. Both Asmis and Pfeffer were appropriate choices for the task; for once, the internecine jousting that passed for administration in Nazi Germany had worked.

Asmis, a seasoned veteran nearing the end of his career, had been German consul-general in Sydney from 1932 to 1939, and was thus the senior German diplomat in the country in the absence of an ambassador. He had served in German Togo, 1907–10, and been in the foreign ministry since 1912 with postings from Moscow to Bangkok, gaining a reputation as both an accomplished diplomat and anthropologist. Serving party rather than state by 1942, Asmis was earmarked for a position as a state-secretary in a future Reich colonial ministry. Although he had joined the party in April 1938, he was an old Wilhelmine careerist rather than a new Nazi ideologue.

Confident in his critical understanding of Australia and Australians through extensive travel and contacts at the highest level, including with Prime Minister Lyons, whose inclination towards appeasement he had encouraged, Dr Asmis held no high regard for the country’s policy-makers or people. Following a tour of the outback in mid-1935, he had been especially critical, as an anthropologist, of the “unethical” nature of Aboriginal policy. His subsequent report on the Aboriginal question, “Australian Aboriginal Policy”, had gathered dust in the foreign ministry in the meantime, but the attitudes expressed therein towards white Australians resurfaced in the Kloss document of 1942. Although he approved of Australia’s racially exclusive immigration policy, Asmis critically noted the distinction between Australian and New Zealand treatment of the indigenous peoples—in the former they were disenfranchised and barred from entry into society; in the latter, they were integrated. This shameful and unconscionable behaviour of white Australians towards Aborigines, his report had concluded with prescience in June 1935, would not be without its nemesis:

If ever the day comes when Australia has to open its doors to mass immigration of the yellow peoples, whether by peaceful negotiation or as a consequence of military attack, then this will be the retribution for the unscrupulous extermination of the population of a continent, undertaken intentionally or tolerated by the English and the Australians since they began their occupation.[iv]

That “day” seemed to Asmis, by July 1942, to be imminent and the time for “retribution” was near.

The Kloss report also showed the hand of another “Australian” specialist, Professor Pfeffer, whose views were more ideologically aligned with the New Order then sweeping Europe and East Asia. The professor had worked in Australian academe from 1932 to 1935, largely escaping public scrutiny until it was suggested by the ever vigilant Smith’s Weekly in Sydney that he had addressed a German study group at the University of Melbourne in mid-1933 and praised the new régime with the partisan fervour of a good Nazi.[v] Aside from this storm-in-a-teacup, the main contribution that Pfeffer had made in his Australian sojourn was the publication of his Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Australien in 1936, a critical study of Australian economy and society. Here, he noted his disillusionment with the old party system of the Weimar republic, since replaced at home, but extant in Australia. What the new country needed, Pfeffer argued with the naivety that only a foreigner could bring to bear, was a dose of Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, or a social union in which each class embraced national unity rather than putting its own needs first—an idealistic striving for higher things rather than a struggle for material survival. By 1942, however, wartime Australia was practising its own version of social cohesion, but it was one that continued to allow the political plurality that was such an anathema to Pfeffer. Disillusioned, he may very well have advised Kloss in the same retributive manner of Asmis. There were common aspects; in his second book on Australia, Australien und Neuseeland (not published until 1943), the professor had noted the extermination of the “negroid” Aborigines of Tasmania by the British settlers, something that Asmis too had commented upon sourly in 1935 and attributed to the “brutality of recidivists”. Elsewhere in the same work, Pfeffer made favourable reference to the 100,000 Australian-Germans and their continuing strong connection of sentiment to the German language and homeland, tolerable in an Australia that had become “a land of the white man”.[vi] As the Japanese shadow lengthened over the continent in the course of 1942, however, it no longer seemed prudent to Dr Kloss to allow this “Group” to fall under Asian domination. The counsel of Asmis the avenger and Pfeffer the ideologue was about to bear fruit.

III

The Kloss report, Die Deutsche Volksgruppe in Australien, was circulated within a limited audience in the Reich foreign ministry after July 1942. Only thirty copies were printed, perhaps through a sense of discretion. It was constructed on the assumption that the Japanese armed forces would at the very least occupy the greater part of the Australian continent, but that some of it, probably the south-eastern portion, would be retained for the European population under either direct Japanese rule or more likely under that of a guided, collaborative, Vichy-like régime (such as functioned, for example, in French Indo-China). The report dealt with two issues: the problem of the German-Australians being placed “under the control of a yellow race”; and a suggested solution to that undesirable scenario.

The problem was regarded as primarily racial, but also contained serious military and diplomatic elements. It was expected, and feared, that the Volksdeutsche would “fanatically” (a stock Nazi term) resist a Japanese occupation by force of arms, out of a sense of racial pride and with a consciousness of Deutschtum—that sense of connection that Pfeffer was soon to suggest was extremely strong and which Kloss acknowledged was likely to increase the number of Australian residents who would identify themselves as “German” in the period of struggle against an invader. Their resistance was judged to be futile, and so suggestions were made to protect German identity in an occupied Australia; collaboration, it was assumed, would follow only after conquest. There was to be an official recognition of the German language; German schools were to be established, or re-established; and the formation of a single organisation to represent Australian Germanism under the leadership of some twenty-six community leaders thought sympathetic to the “new Germany”. The Nazis had long sought to establish and control such organs in the German-Australian community in conformity with their policy of Gleichschaltung, or “co-ordination”; now seemed their opportunity to do so. There was, however, still the problem of race and the sine qua non that Germans could not long be expected to remain under Asian rule, even that of an Axis partner.

Accordingly, Kloss offered solutions. In the event of a Japanese occupation of the entire Australian continent, he could see no alternative to the repatriation of the entire community back to the Greater German Reich. The logistics of such a manoeuvre would prevent its execution until after the Endsieg, the vaunted final victory, but in mid-1942 that was expected to be in the near future. Such wholesale removal back to Europe could also occur even after a partial Japanese occupation, if the members of the “Group” so desired. However, Kloss identified an alternative solution closer to hand under this scenario—the resettlement of the “Group” to the island of Tasmania and the removal of the present Tasmanian population to the mainland rump-state. Pfeffer correctly identified the Anglo-Saxon islanders to number 236,875; his estimation of the size of the “Group” was 100,000 (Kloss thought about 70,000). Therefore, a population exchange across Bass Strait (presumably at gunpoint in some instances) involving at least 300,000 people was envisaged, a modest enough figure given the exchanges and removals of population that Nazi administrators were considering, and implementing, in the European New Order— Kloss himself had noted elsewhere, for example, that some 580,000 Volksdeutsche had already been repatriated to the Reich by April 1942.

The Tasmanian figure might also seem less extraordinary in the light of the tens of millions, many of them Germans, who were later reshuffled from one part of Europe to another after the end of the war. Nevertheless, the Kloss solution was a dramatic one in the Australian context and would have concentrated the minds of Hardy Wilson’s esteemed Tasmanians wonderfully, had Allied propagandists been aware of it. Australians, however, remained as ignorant of it as the Germans themselves, for the report was shelved after military setbacks for the Axis in Europe and Asia. Only after the collapse of the Reich was this footnote in Australian history brought to light.

IV

Dr Kloss and his suggestions were soon overtaken by events. The foreign ministry itself was reduced to rubble as Soviet armour penetrated the Wilhelmstrasse even before Hitler’s death at the end of April 1945. Dreams of colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing, as we would call it today, were no longer a luxury that Germans enjoyed, but were perverted into their national nightmare, “Year Zero”. Meanwhile, an Australian Army intelligence officer, Major R.E. Finzel, had arrived in London in June 1945 with the aim of proceeding to occupied Germany in order to search for evidence of contacts between the former espionage institutions of the Reich and German-Australians. He returned to London before the end of August with little of this, but had in the course of his search inadvertently learned of the existence of the 1942 Volksgruppe report. Finzel had first interrogated Ernst Bohle, the former head of the party’s bureau dealing with overseas Germans (Auslandsorganisation) and a former foreign ministry official, who denied everything, but he had more luck when tracking the records of the Deutsches Auslands-Institut from Stuttgart to the University of Heidelberg. Dr Kloss eluded Finzel, but he managed to interview the former president of the Institute, Dr Stroelin, who appeared to have provided him with the 1942 “brochure”, as the major so euphemistically described it in his subsequent report of February 1946. Perhaps the sight of a Europe torn from its hinges had hardened Finzel, for the only part of the document that he found surprising was the large number of ethnic Germans considered likely by Kloss to identify themselves as Volksdeutsche in the event of a Japanese conquest; some 70,000 (Finzel was clearly unaware of Pfeffer’s considerably higher estimate). However surprising these estimates were, at the time the major was preparing his report, fewer than 500 Volksdeutsche were earmarked for deportation; fewer than 5000 returned voluntarily to their now devastated Fatherland. There the matter ended and Finzel’s “Nazi Activities in Australia. Report on Investigations in Germany” saw no more public light than Kloss’s “brochure”.

Ω

Some, but not all, of the players in this drama also avoided scrutiny. Kloss, the central figure, continued his academic career in linguistics in the successor institute to his old DAI, also at Stuttgart, a city no longer designated the Nazi “capital” for Volksdeutsche. He later described himself under the Third Reich as “a complicated young [sic] man with a complicated fate in a complicated time”. He also continued to protest against his 1945 dismissal from the University of Tübingen, to profess his anti-Nazi credentials and to publish extensively. He died in 1987. Karl-Heinz Pfeffer followed a similar trajectory. Immediately after the war he was reduced from his prestigious Berlin professorship to a less demanding position in town planning in Hanover, a considerable undertaking in the newer Germany then being reconstructed. By 1952, again a “Professor”, he had secured a promotion to a quasi-academic, economic policy think-tank in Hamburg, although unable to attain his goal of returning to an academic position in Australia—it could be assumed that the University of Tasmania was not on his wish-list. Pfeffer eventually satisfied his Wanderlust with an episode at the University of the Punjab. He died in 1971.

Dr-Dr Asmis, however, was not fortunate enough to endure even such reduced circumstances—his fate was not so “complicated”. There was to be no Reich colonial ministry and therefore no position for him as a state-secretary, so Asmis was returned to the foreign ministry in 1943 at the end of his service in the now defunct NSDAP colonial bureau. Before the war ended he had written his memoirs, Das Ende eines Paradies (an ominous, almost allegorical, title for the Nazi mind to ponder) and retired to the western outskirts of Berlin. However, in June 1945 the long arm of the Soviet NKVD rudely interrupted whatever tranquillity remained to him. Asmis was whisked away to Siberian captivity, where he soon perished. His property was confiscated once the Soviets had branded him as a “Nazi war criminal”, habitually failing to consider the distinction between this damning cover-all and that of “fellow-traveller”, a distinction that would allow the likes of Kloss and Pfeffer to flourish, further to the west. Asmis suffered his own form of retribution for having been a careerist Nazi.

Meanwhile, the Tasmanians, including generations of my own family, entered upon their postwar mini-industrial-revolution and basked in their sesquicentenary in 1953–54, ignorant of a fate narrowly avoided. The strong connection that they had always felt for their idyllic island would surely have been strengthened, and appreciated to a greater extent, had they become aware of how close they had been to losing a possession grasped such a short time earlier by the “settlers” and “recidivists” of whom Asmis had been so contemptuous. Dr Henning’s pre-war trickle of German migration was not significantly increased after the conflict—by 2001 only some 1300 Tasmanian households identified themselves as speakers of the German language. Yet, by one of the strange twists of history, international extreme-right groups such as the American “Stormfront” have recently identified Tasmania as the “whitest place on earth”. Accordingly, they have focused on the island in their curious quest for racial purity and global apartheid. Perhaps the retributive spirit of Kloss, Pfeffer and Asmis lingers, alongside the utopianism of Eucalyptus.

Dr David Bird, a fourth-generation Tasmanian, is an independent historian based in Melbourne. This article contains material collected in research on a topic that will be further detailed in a coming publication. He wrote on Joseph Lyons in the November issue.