A human face to Australia’s forgotten Nazi hunt

A Melbourne author has used fiction to revive the little-known story of Australia’s government-run Nazi hunting unit, which investigated more than 800 suspected war criminals and secured no convictions.

Tony Jaques, a former journalist and corporate communicator, published The Man in the Photograph in August. The novel follows Sam Ravitz, a 72-year-old Melbourne accountant and Stutthof survivor who opens his morning newspaper in 1989 and recognises, in a group photograph at a housing development launch, the SS officer who shot his brother in the camp’s bookkeeping unit.

Jaques said he came to the subject through military history and discovered how little was known about the Special Investigations Unit, set up by the Hawke government in 1987 and wound up under Paul Keating in 1994.

“I’ve been very interested in military history and World War Two history for a long time, and when I read about the Special Investigation Unit, I had not ever read about it before,” he told The AJN. “After some research, I realised that it’s actually quite little known in Australia.”

He said he chose fiction deliberately.

“I decided it would probably be easier to write it in a novel form rather than just trying to write a non-fiction book about the organisation itself,” he said.

“The problem with non-fiction is that many people just simply don’t read non-fiction, and I wanted to get the widest possible audience. I thought that giving this story a human face would avoid it being just a story about bureaucracy and about the legal system.”

What drew him to the material, he said, was institutional failure.

“The government tried to set up an organisation to achieve a particular objective, and despite a huge amount of work, it did not succeed in that objective in the end,” he said.

Jaques said the unit believed it had one strong case remaining when funding was cut.

“The government said no. We’re going to turn off the money tap, and as a result, it got wound up after seven years, which I think was a loss to Australian society.”

In the novel, Ravitz reports the developer to the unit and is told there is not enough evidence to prove that the respected businessman and the missing SS officer are the same man. A newspaper declines to publish for fear of defamation. Ravitz then sets out to trap the man on a forged environmental report, and the book closes with a conviction that has nothing to do with the camps.

Jaques said his protagonist was meant to be sympathetic without being admirable.

“He couldn’t get away from his past when he found a guard from that camp living in Melbourne and felt he had to do something, even though it put his family at risk,” he said.

“I think in the end, people would probably sympathise with him, even though they might think that he did go too far and get rather obsessive.”

He described the former camp officer as “a rather slick and charming but unpleasant character who cares nothing whatever about anybody around him”, a trait shown through his treatment of a girlfriend in postwar Hamburg and later his wife in Melbourne.

Jaques said Graham Blewitt, the deputy director and then director of the SIU, who also appears in the recent SBS documentary The Hunt for the Last Nazis, became a major source for the novel.

“He gave me some tremendous support and answered endless questions and phone calls and emails,” Jaques said.

“One of the things I learned in doing this novel was that if you ask people politely the right questions, people are incredibly generous with their time and their knowledge to help get across an important story.”

Asked whether the book had been difficult to place at a time when publishers are widely reported to be wary of Jewish and Holocaust themes, Jaques said he had opted for author-assisted publishing rather than wait.

“In the end, I I did that because I wanted the story to get out and not be delayed,” he said. “But I don’t think that diminishes in any way the story or the novel.”

He said he expected readers well beyond the community. At the Melbourne launch of Nazis in Australia, the SIU history compiled by Blewitt, he watched the chair ask an audience of about 200 people how many had heard of the unit before reading the book.

“It was just a handful of people who put their hands up,” Jaques said. “Even within the Jewish community, the fact that the government set up a Nazi hunting unit was just not known.”

He said the book also had a political dimension, and “what seemed to be a very smart idea by Bob Hawke was, in the end, terminated by Paul Keating”.

Above all, he said, it is a domestic story.

“It’s also a very strong family story about the way a family responded to this situation and how what happened finished up tearing their family apart.”

The Man in the Photograph is available online through Amazon and other online retailers: https://a.co/d/0heTDx9G