50 Years on the Run

Nazi Kalejs died on November the 8th 2001...Australia announced that this villain has died while awaiting extradition from Australia...Justice is served; but Latvian leaders rightfully so; expressed their regret that Kalejs did not spend his remaining days behind bars or was executed for his crimes. Many more human rights violators and murders are free and seemingly being protected by democratic governments. One can only guess why these countries are reluctant to see Justice brought to bear on the evil foes of freedom)

The following material is left up for historical perspective. In a time when people are concerned about simple human rights offensives; some of the most murderous criminals of our day go unpunished for their crimes. Some of these war criminals are among the world population today; and it is important that action be taken against them. When war criminals know that even if it takes 50 or 100 years they will be caught and held personally responsible for their actions and they will be humiliated in the world court system and they will suffer imprisonment or death eventually...then this action serves as a deterrent to future atrocities...to let them roam free and bulletproof reaffirms their belief in invincibility. The world must act together to see them brought to justice for their crimes. To give them safe harbor is also a crime against humanity. -The Editor

KONRADS KALEJS, aged 32, emerged from the ruins of wartime Europe with a past that left him no choice but to run. Even decades later, people would remember his name and his reported role as a commander in a mobile killing squad that murdered an estimated 70,000 people, most of them Jews.

But Kalejs's globe-trotting in a bid to escape justice officials in several countries, and Nazi-hunters from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, would not come to dominate his life until he was an old and sick man. By then he had become a millionaire international fugitive with an assumed name and a suitcase full of cash, who blamed the former Russian secret service, the KGB, for framing him for war crimes.

Kalejs has now been deported from the US, Canada and Britain. This week he was barred from Mexico. He appears willing to live in any country that will accept him, except his native Latvia, and Australia, which, reportedly, he does not like - even though he landed once again in Melbourne last night.

The revelation at Christmas that a frail Latvian living in a posh Leicestershire retirement home may be one of the most notorious surviving Nazis created a furor in Britain, as authorities appeared to bungle their chance to prosecute Kalejs.

Despite demands from Nazi-hunters that Kalejs, now 86, face trial, Britain chose instead to deport him to Australia. Home Secretary Jack Straw said the burden of proof in a trial made prosecution difficult, if not impossible, even though on ``the balance of probabilities, this man was complicit in war crimes''.

But Straw's decision not to prosecute Kalejs and to allow him to leave the country has infuriated Nazi-hunters and human rights activists. British authorities had a substantial dossier on Kalejs, says political scientist Dr Anthony Glees, who several years ago was part of a British inquiry into suspected war criminals living in the UK.

Glees described Britain's response as an ``an outrageous decision which gives entirely the wrong signal to former Nazi war criminals and to any other war criminal and any other human rights abuser. There's considerable evidence already on file about this man, and this evidence is in New Scotland Yard. It's not in Canada or Australia.

``The impression was given that this was a man that few people had ever heard of, and that virtually nothing was known about him in the UK. That is entirely untrue,'' he said.

But the attacks on Straw may pale before worldwide criticism directed at the Australian Government and its claim that there is insufficient evidence to put Kalejs on trial - particularly as the US, Canadian and British governments have deported Kalejs to Australia, the only country that will accept him.

KALEJS has a remarkable talent for slipping out of the public eye. He most likely left Melbourne for London in mid-to-late 1998. Although he has no known connections in England, he clearly preferred to go there rather than remain at the Latvian retirement village at Wantirna, where protesters regularly scrawled Nazi symbols on the walls and waited for him as he took a daily walk. The hostility directed at Kalejs led some residents and managers to think that while he was a pleasant man who minded his own business, his presence lowered the tone of the place.

After his deportation from the US in 1994, Kalejs occasionally stayed at the village. But he also spent some of these years in Canada, where he was discovered in 1997 living in an expensive apartment in Toronto. The building was occupied by 35 Jewish families - some Holocaust survivors, others the families of survivors. Many had swum with Kalejs in the building's heated pool.

Once deported from Canada, Kalejs spent no more than a year back in Australia. Late last year, Kim Skeen, a researcher on the American ABC television program 20/20, discovered through a Melbourne private detective that Kalejs had cleaned out his Australian bank accounts and left for London. While researching a story on Nazi war criminals in Australia, Skeen came to Melbourne, only to find that Kalejs had disappeared. But the detective gave Skeen the critical clue: Kalejs had flown to London.

In Jerusalem, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Dr Efraim Zuroff, who has pursued Kalejs for years, tipped off police and the media. After 55 years fleeing public scrutiny, Kalejs was unmasked again.

Such a flight would never have seemed necessary in 1945. Kalejs emerged from a postwar Europe struggling to rebuild destroyed political and social structures. At that time, people often created histories to match new identities. It was possible to wipe out the past simply by lying, as Kalejs did on immigration papers to enter Australia and, later, the US. Yet, like hundreds of other alleged war criminals, Kalejs did not change his name after the war. Even after he was deported from the US as a war criminal who had lied about his past, his name was listed in the Melbourne telephone directory.

Kalejs moved to Denmark after the war and stayed there until 1947. He lived in Germany for the next three years, where he was divorced from his wife. In November 1950, he arrived in Australia under the refugee resettlement program, arriving in Melbourne on a refugee ship, the General Muir.

He worked for the Immigration Department at the Bonegilla migrant camp, near Wodonga. Robert Greenwood, QC, the former head of the Special Investigations Unit into Nazi criminals in Australia, believes Kalejs may have been recruited by ASIO at this time. There are claims he helped Nazi killers to enter Australia, and that he knew Karlis Ozols, also a member of the Arajs Kommando and now in a Melbourne nursing home, whose war crimes record exceeds even what Kalejs is said to have done.

Kalejs worked for nine years at the Victorian Ministry of Water Supply and for the Immigration Department. But he never liked Australia, says Konrad Kwiet, who was chief historian to the Special Investigations Unit. As the evidence shows, Kalejs tries to leave every chance he gets.

In 1959, within two years of gaining Australian citizenship, he emigrated to the US, where he lived for the next 35 years until his deportation. He made a fortune from real estate. The Justice Department first went after Kalejs in late 1984, but as it moved to arrest him, he fled with $350,000 in cash, first to Canada and then Australia.

Kalejs quickly returned to the US. He tried to assume a new identity and evaded arrest for six months. He was arrested in Florida in April, 1985, and was later ordered to be deported.

When Kalejs appealed, the US Court of Appeals was told he owned four homes, had assets of more than a million dollars in the mid-'80s, and could post a $750,000 bond to secure his freedom while his appeal was pending. After a 10-year legal process, he lost the case. The court found Kalejs had been ``a key officer in a unit that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians''.

Kalejs's greatest tormentor is public opinion and the Nazi-hunters who pursue him around the world. Kwiet says Kalejs hates being on the run. He has tried several times to reenter the US and Canada, but has been deported each time. Kalejs was born in Riga, the capital of Latvia, in June 1913. He is a small, well-built man with a striking face that even his victims have said is handsome. During deportation proceedings in Canada he said the nine-hour sessions were too much for him to bear. But, at 86, he is in remarkable physical condition, although he is said to complain about his health. He still bears the hallmarks of a highly trained, tough professional soldier of the wartime period, probably driven by a not-uncommon Latvian nationalism and anti-Semitism.

As a young man, he loved sport and developed a skill that helped him kill people: he became expert at skiing. Kwiet describes this skill as ``a special feature'', essential at times for Kalejs and the Nazi-inspired Latvian death squad of which he was said to be a leading member.

``In the winter snow, when it was hard to move around, the unit went around on skis, killing people,'' says Kwiet. ``He (Kalejs) was very good on skis. That explains his good health today.''

Kalejs is said to be intelligent, his demeanor gruff. The latter description comes from those who seek to broach with him his alleged involvement in the mass murder of men, women and children, the public hangings of concentration camp victims, the razing of villages, the mounting of machine-guns on trains to mow down villagers as they passed their homes ... It is a subject Kalejs does not like to discuss.

Kalejs entered the Latvian Military Academy as a cadet in October 1935. He graduated with distinction in August 1937 and was promoted to lieutenant. He moved up the ranks and became a first lieutenant in November 1939.

After the German invasion of Latvia in June 1941, he became a member of an armed unit in Litene, in the country's northeast, ``pursuing and terrorizing'' communists and others.

In July 1941, he joined the notorious Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, known also as the Arajs Kommando, which killed Jews, communists, gypsies and others deemed undesirable. Kalejs denies claims by former kommando members that he was one of their number.

Witnesses at legal proceedings in the US and Canada and statements to the Australian Special Investigations Unit have placed Kalejs as a commander or senior lieutenant, and also as a concentration camp guard at locations where thousands of women, children and men were slaughtered, and villages razed.

Kalejs's US deportation hearing was told that because his unit had so few members ``and because the shooting actions took place so frequently, all Latvian Auxiliary Security personnel were personally involved in the killings, even the staff of the supply department and the motor-pool mechanics. These executions were supervised by officers such as Kalejs who were present at the shooting sites.''

The witness statements also put Kalejs behind the Russian front, as an important figure in murder campaigns. He was a company commander when he left the kommando in July 1944 to join an SS training battalion. This was part of the Latvian Legion and was his last posting before his capture.

IN 1986, the Hawke Government ordered an investigation into alleged Nazi war criminals after the publication of Sanctuary, by journalist and author Mark Aarons, which claimed Australia was a haven for former Nazis.

Yet there is evidence that Australian Government agencies must have known of Kalejs's alleged Nazi links years before the Menzies investigation. In 1982, the US Office of Special Investigation into Nazi war criminals asked Australia for information on Kalejs's entry to Australia and about his wartime activities. The official request from the American office described Kalejs as a ``Nazi war criminal''.

Menzies warned in his report that if the US deportation succeeded, Kalejs would be the first person living in Australia against whom there had been ``a judicial decision in effect determining his guilt of a war crime''.

In 1993, seven years after the Menzies report and 11 years after the American request for information on Kalejs, the Government's Special Investigations Unit into Nazi war criminals declared: ``If Kalejs returns to Australia, there may be a community expectation that he would be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act.

Will Kalejs ever be prosecuted? Efraim Zuroff insists he must be. The director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said this week that if Australian authorities had invested one-hundredth of the resources and energy that Kalejs had in murdering Jews, Kalejs would now be in prison.

Lord Janner, a prominent antiwar crimes campaigner in Britain, says: ``We want (Australia) to collect the evidence, charge him, and send him to prison for the rest of his days.''

A leading Nazi hunter for the United States Government has castigated Australia's failure to pursue alleged mass murderers of thousands of men, women and children in the Holocaust.

The damning criticism was broadcast nationwide in the US this weekend after a three-month investigation of war criminals in Australia by the ABC's 20/20 program, which portrays Australia as a haven for the wartime killers.

The program, which interviewed Holocaust survivors, war crimes investigators, Government officials and one alleged war criminal, mainly in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, opened with the remarks: "Half a century after the Holocaust men who allegedly took part in some of history's worst atrocities are enjoying retirement, some living in luxury. And there seems no chance they'll ever face any charges."

The program compared Australia's record with the US, which has deported 50 alleged war criminals and says countries in Europe are winning criminal convictions. "But Australia has yet to deport or convict a single one," the program says.

The most stinging criticism comes from Mr Eli Rosenbaum, the top Nazi hunter for the US Justice Department in Washington and Mr Robert Greenwood, QC, the former head of the Federal Government's special investigations unit into war criminals in Australia, who says there were 27 war criminal cases worth pursuing at the time the Federal Government closed down the unit.

Ozols, now in a retirement home, later taught Jewish children to play chess in Melbourne. Also featured is Argods Friscons who, The Age revealed previously, taught Jewish students in Melbourne after allegedly killing Jews during the war.

The 20/20 program reported that Kalejs, an Australian citizen, appeared to be a man without a country after being deported from the US and Canada. "Kalejs flew back to Australia," the program says. "The Government provided a security escort to whisk him away from reporters."

The former Monash University academic and noted author, Harry Redner, of Caulfield, who, aged five to eight, witnessed mass murders and individual shootings while on the run with his mother in what was then southern Poland, revealed on the program his horror at learning last year that Karlis Ozols had tutored him and other young Jews in chess in a mostly Jewish club in St Kilda.

His memories were of blood flowing and murder, of not daring to breathe at times for fear he would be noticed and shot. Australia was far away from the scene of the terror, but the memories have remained. "There is not a day in my life that I have not thought about it in one way or another," he told The Sunday Age.

He says he would have "shrunk in horror" had he known the history of his chess tutor, Ozols, who 10 years earlier would have had him shot because he was Jewish. "I would have jumped out of my skin had I known what he had done."

He remembers Ozols as a very "very clipped, very tight" person who never looked at the young Jewish chess players in the eyes. He often played them simultaneously - but never let them win.

Wheelchair-bound Kalejs is reportedly suffering dementia, cancer and blindness and does not recognize his own legal team. But Jewish groups have warned Kalejs may not be as sick as claimed.

"Without an independent medical evaluation it's very hard to say exactly what the state of Mr Kalejs' health is," Mr Hyams said. "I have no way of knowing one way or another, but that has happened in the past."

Aided by two (care takers), Kalejs appeared to nap in his wheelchair as Magistrate Lisa Hannan ordered him to return to Latvia to face charges of genocide and war crimes during World War II.

A silent Kalejs was taken into custody at Melbourne Magistrates' Court by federal police after Ms Hannan's ruling. But, within two hours a Federal Court judge released Kalejs on bail, citing ill-health, age, and his Australian citizenship as factors. The appeal process could take more than a year.

Ms Hannan was not required to determine innocence or guilt, but to rule whether the offenses would be crimes in present-day Australia. She found Kalejs could be charged with crimes such as murder, manslaughter and false imprisonment if the offenses happened today in Victoria.

Kalejs could also be charged with willful killing, torture, and inhuman treatment under the Geneva Convention Act 1957. He has always denied the allegations, which first surfaced in the US in 1984.

"Australia is seen as a safe haven for war criminals because genocide is not unlawful in this country," Senator Greig said. "The sooner the Democrats' anti-genocide bill is adopted, the sooner we will be able to deal with war criminals without resorting to court proceedings of the Kalejs kind." A date for Kalejs' appeal has not been set.

Even in death, bitter dispute swirls around Konrads Kalejs. The accused Nazi, who was fighting extradition to Latvia to face war crimes charges, died on Thursday in an eastern suburbs retirement village.

But Mark Aarons, an expert on suspected war criminals in Australia, said the death was "symbolic of the failure of Australian governments over the last 55 years to adequately investigate and bring to justice people who committed some of the worst mass killings of World War II".

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has called for the reinstatement of the Special Investigations Unit to investigate not only alleged Nazi war criminals living in Australia, but others from Cambodia, the Balkans and Afghanistan. The unit, set up in 1987, was closed by the Keating government.

Latvia had alleged that Mr Kalejs had commanded a border guard unit at the Salaspils labor camp. It said he had ordered at least six prisoners to be shot and also knew that up to 300 Jewish prisoners had been marked for extermination.

But Mr Kalejs' barrister Brian Walters said yesterday that his client was an 88-year-old man with advanced dementia whose possible extradition was politically motivated and whose last appearance in court, on a hospital stretcher, was degrading. Mr Kalejs had begun an appeal against the decision to extradite him to Latvia to face genocide and war crimes charges.

"It was a failure of the system that an application for extradition against a sick, demented old man was made. It was a failure of the Justice Minister, Senator (Chris) Ellison, that he did not stop it," he said. "The minister's attitude to Mr Kalejs' health was callous and the treatment of Mr Kalejs was inhumane."

"One should never forget that the crimes of which Kalejs was accused, and which were found against him in two Western courts, in Canada and the US, were the most gross acts of persecution against innocent men, women and children," he said. "And he and the people he worked with had absolutely no compunction about persecuting and killing them en masse. That alone ought to be enough to convince any reasonable person that this was not an act of persecution but an act of justice."

Premier Steve Bracks yesterday said it was regrettable that Mr Kalejs was not tried. "I've always had the consistent position that he should have been brought to trial, and sooner rather than later."

"I see no reason whatsoever that, until the last Nazi is dead, Australia should not continue to investigate and bring to justice the last of its Nazis. Otherwise we will have the shocking international epitaph for this era: That the last Nazi died peacefully in his bed in Australia."

Nina Bassat, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said that while the age of alleged war criminals made prosecutions problematic, they should still be investigated. "Identifying war criminals and pointing to their activities also has a validity. It makes people remember, it especially makes Holocaust-denial people that little more hesitant because these are the facts on the ground."

Mr Aarons said it is believed several dozen former Khmer Rouge and several hundred Balkans war criminals live in Australia, as well as perhaps 100 former officials from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

"It's the grossest hypocrisy that senior officials of the communist intelligence service that murdered and tortured millions of people between 1979 and 1989 are now Australian citizens, where the people they persecuted and who are fleeing an equally obnoxious regime, the Taliban, are turned away and made pariahs."