The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), known as the Australian Communist Party (ACP) from 1944 to 1951, was an Australian political party founded in 1920. The party existed until roughly 1991, with its membership and influence having been in a steady decline since its peak in 1945. Like most communist parties in the west, the party was heavily involved in the labour movement and the trade unions. Its membership, popularity and influence grew significantly during most of the interwar period before reaching its climax in 1945, where the party achieved a membership of slightly above 22,000 members. Although the party did not achieve a federal MP, Fred Paterson was elected to the Parliament of Queensland at the 1944 state election. He won re-election in 1947 before the seat was abolished. The party also held office in over a dozen local government areas across New South Wales and Queensland.
The ratlines were systems of escape routes for German Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, though also in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Spain and Switzerland.
Marcellin College is a Catholic secondary boys' college in Bulleen, Victoria, Australia.
Much of the focus of the discussion about Nazi gold concerns how much of it Nazi Germany transferred to overseas banks during World War II. The Nazis looted the assets of its victims to accumulate wealth. In 1998, a Swiss commission estimated that the Swiss National Bank held $440 million of Nazi gold, over half of which is believed to have been looted.
John Joseph Loftus, is an American author, former high level U.S. government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer. He is the president of The Intelligence Summit and of the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.
Alois Karl Hudal was an Austrian bishop of the Catholic Church, based in Rome. For thirty years, he was the head of the Austrian-German congregation of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome and, until 1937, an influential representative of the Catholic Church in Austria.
The Moran family is an infamous Melbourne, Australia-based criminal family notable for their involvement in the Melbourne gangland killings. Family matriarch Judy Moran lost two sons, Jason and Mark, estranged husband Lewis, and brother-in-law Des died in an underworld feud that resulted in the deaths of over 30 criminals from January 1998 to August 2010.
Croatian Australians are Australian citizens of Croatian ancestry. Croatia has been a source of migrants to Australia, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2021, around 200,000 persons resident in Australia (0.6%) identified themselves as being born in Croatia or having Croatian ancestry.
Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović was a Bosnian Croat Roman Catholic priest associated with the ratlines which aided the escape of Ustaše war criminals from Europe after World War II while he was living and working at the College of St. Jerome in Rome. He was an Ustaša and a functionary in the fascist puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia.
Lawrence Louis Sharkey, commonly known as Lance Sharkey or L. L. Sharkey, was an Australian trade unionist and communist leader. From 1948 to 1965 he served as the secretary-general of Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Sharkey was an orthodox Communist throughout his political career, closely following the prevailing Soviet line in each major turn of policy.
Dominik Mandić was a Herzegovinian Croat Franciscan and historian.
Karlis Aleksandrs Ozols was a Latvian lieutenant in the Nazi-controlled Latvian Auxiliary Police and a member of Heinrich Himmler's SS during WW2. After later migrating to Australia, he was recommended to be charged under that country's War Crimes Act for helping oversee the mass-killings of Jews and anti-fascist insurgents in both Latvia and Belarus, but this was not pursued to prosecution. Ozols was also a champion Latvian-Australian chess player.
Evelyn Douglas Darby MP was an Australian politician, elected as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly. His efforts in denouncing socialism, attacking the labour movement, breaking strikes, organising anti-Soviet Eastern European émigrés, supporting Australia's military commitment to the Vietnam War, and championing non-communist Taiwan, established Darby's reputation as a powerful right-wing ideologue.
Anarchism in Australia arrived within a few years of anarchism developing as a distinct tendency in the wake of the 1871 Paris Commune. Although a minor school of thought and politics, composed primarily of campaigners and intellectuals, Australian anarchism has formed a significant current throughout the history and literature of the colonies and nation. Anarchism's influence has been industrial and cultural, though its influence has waned from its high point in the early 20th century where anarchist techniques and ideas deeply influenced the official Australian union movement. In the mid 20th century anarchism's influence was primarily restricted to urban bohemian cultural movements. In the late 20th century and early 21st century Australian anarchism has been an element in Australia's social justice and protest movements.
Ferdinand Ďurčanský was a Slovak nationalist leader who for a time served with as a minister in the government of the Axis-aligned Slovak State in 1939 and 1940. He was known for spreading virulent antisemitic propaganda, although he left the government before the Holocaust in Slovakia was fully implemented. After the war, he joined the Gehlen Organization.
Karol Sidor was a Slovak nationalist politician and journalist. Active from an early age, he was undecided about full independence and as a result was largely sidelined during the Slovak Republic.
In late 1934 and early 1935, the United Australia Party government of Joseph Lyons failed to exclude Egon Kisch, a member of the Communist Party of Germany, from entering Australia.
Eric Aarons was a member of the third of four generations of the Aarons family who played leading roles in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).
Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War is a 2008 book by historian Michael Phayer which makes use of documents that had been released under US President Bill Clinton's 1997 executive order declassifying wartime and postwar documents.
At the end of World War II in 1945, members of the fascist Croatian ultranationalist Ustaše regime from the collapsed Nazi puppet state of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) fled from the Balkan region to avoid imprisonment and execution at the hands of the Yugoslav Partisans. With the help of Western authorities, who now viewed the fiercely anti-communist stance of the Ustaše favourably in the emerging Cold War, thousands of members of the regime were allowed to migrate to other countries, including Australia.
