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BOOK REVIEW
| Gary Gumpl and Richard Kleinig, The Hitler Club: The Rise and Fall of Australia's No. 1 Nazi, Brolga Publishing, Melbourne, 2007. pp. xvii + 427. $29.95 paper.
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| This is a welcome contribution to the truncated literature on the history of extreme right-wing politics in Australia. Gumpl and Kleinig are to be congratulated on their researches into the life and times of Dr Johannes Heinrich Becker, reputedly 'Australia's No. 1 Nazi' in the 1930s. |
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Unfortunately the authors, despite their legal training and judicial vocation, are predisposed to present a whitewash of their subject. In large part they say they are motivated by the absence of damning evidence against Becker, leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in Australia from 1933 to 1936. This may be so. But Gumpl and Kleinig are determined to paint their subject as conspired against by Australian ignorance and suspicion, the security services and later the Returned Soldiers' League. The vehemence of their argument arouses scepticism. In their view the so-called 'Hitler Club', a term coined by the local informer in Tanunda, South Australia, was largely harmless. 'Unlike the ubiquitous, well-organised villains in Nazi Germany', they write,
in Australia the group that assembled under the swastika was little more than a fraternity of expatriates bemoaning the humiliations of Versailles and barracking for a team, led by Hitler, that was going to win back the trophy (p. xiii).
At the very least this is a highly contestable assessment. The authors might well have found relevant material in the Berlin Document Centre where the NSDAP records are held, as well as other archives in Germany, but did not investigate this possibility. |
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Equally debateable is the inference made in the book and its pre-publication publicity in which the authors and Dr Becker's son, a former South Australian Liberal MP, compare Becker with David Hicks and invoke recent events at Guantanamo Bay. Unlike Hicks, Dr Becker was not merely a foot-soldier and a minor, rather gullible, almost unwitting figure. He visited Berlin in 1933, claiming upon his return that as head of the Nazi movement in Australia he acknowledged only three superior officers exclusive of Herr Hitler. Becker was a passionate National Socialist and committed anti-Semite. Establishing the Bund, a confederation of German clubs in Australia and New Zealand, to spread the gospel of Nazism on 30 May 1933, he was an ardent propagandist. Dr Becker remained the principal figure in Australian Nazism from 1933 to 1936. That he stopped being 'No. 1 Nazi' in 1936 was not due to a change of heart, but simply a power play within Nazi circles that saw a rival group in Sydney led by Consul-General Asmis assert its pre-eminence. Gumpl and Kleinig, predictably enough, paint Asmis as a Nazi ogre, an interpretation not supported by the academic articles of John Perkins on that subject. |
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While Gumpl and Kleinig do not directly confront the issue, more than likely Dr Becker was not conducting espionage as part of a Nazi Fifth Column in Australia. Reasoning that using high-profile individuals like Becker as spies would be counterproductive, it was not common practice for the German secret services to use the Auslandsorganisation for anything more than strengthening 'bonds binding motherland and nationals abroad'. Another recent work by James and Patience Barnes, Nazis in Pre-War London 1930–1939, (Sussex University Press, 2005) reaches similar conclusions about the Nazi network in London. One might add that Gumpl and Kleinig do not mention the problem of geography. In the heart of the Barossa Valley, Becker was admirably situated to inform Berlin about the highlights of the district's annual wine crop, but less well equipped to provide details of shipping movements and industrial production, than for instance, the Japanese, whose consulate overlooked Sydney Harbour. Hopefully Barbara Poniewierski's excellent PhD thesis will be published and shed further light on these questions, as might the forthcoming work being edited by Christine Winter and Emily Turner Graham, National Socialism in Oceania (Peter Berg, Berlin). |
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Nonetheless, it is hardly surprising that Dr Becker was interned in 1939. As one journalist, Rebecca Weisser, pointed out in response to the Becker-Hicks analogy, if any moral outrage needs to be expressed about the internment of Germans during World War II, it would be more appropriate to reserve this for the 2100 German and Austrian Jews who were interned in camps alongside Nazis like Becker. This truly horrific experience makes even contemporary events in detention centres pale by way of comparison. |
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Though a handsome volume, The Hitler Club would have benefited from more judicious editing. Indeed it shows no evidence of being edited at all. Much of its argument is rambling and episodic. At some points the text is no more polished than a series of research notes, the burden of which sometimes contradicts the text. Indubitably its worst and utterly unforgivable feature is the lack of an index. Where this should be instead are published are two letters of thanks to the authors from Dr Becker's children, a bizarre development in Australian publishing practice |
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| University of Western Sydney |
ANDREW MOORE | |
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