Suspicions aroused

I tell this story by way of an illustration of the August 14 article “A Nazi mass murderer in our midst?” that New Zealand may have “walked away from the problem of Nazi war crimes”.

This memory has always haunted me. When I was growing up in Timaru during the 50s and 60s, my mother was friends with a couple. The wife was Czech and the husband Ukrainian. Erich said openly that he had been a batman for a Nazi general during World War II. This was possibly, and maybe probably, suspicious in itself, because the Ukrainian Nazis who worked for the Germans were particularly brutal. What I found suspicious was that, periodically, groups of German men would come over from Argentina, and Erich would take them hunting.

This meant more as I got older and learnt more about the war and the Holocaust. My father, long dead now, was at Monte Cassino and North Africa during the war, and I later wondered why he never thought it strange to have this man openly living among us without investigation.

I understand that soldiers who come back from war often want to forget, and he may have thought it was taken care of by the Government, but there must be accountability. I hope New Zealand has grown a stronger ethical backbone.

Ann Mackay

(Oamaru)

LETTER OF THE WEEK

VACCINATION ACTION

The August 7 was spot-on. With New