War Trials, Refugees and Holocaust Awareness: 1945–1949

Chapter 8 explores the Australian press response to the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, including the trials of Nazi war criminals and the transnational migration of Jewish survivors until 1949. Despite the heavily documented news of Nazi criminality, the suffering of European Jewry was rarely used by the press to advocate for Jewish migration to Australia, as immigration surged during the federal Labor government’s expanded—but highly selective—post-war immigration program. The period was marked by the interdependent and sometimes combative relationship between the government and press over migration, as well as the official inclination to seek to censor journalists when reporting on Jewish refugees. Central to the discussion are the journalists who collectively mediated and influenced both the Australian public’s understanding of Holocaust and its reception of the survivors—survivors whose trauma was often disregarded as an ephemeral emotion that passed the moment they were liberated from the Nazis.