(Not to be confused with how Austria’s Fascists got away with supporting the Third Reich, which is another story for another time.)

“Nothing happened to them after the war,” she says. “They went back to their farms, back to their work. Thought they got away with it. Which they did, I suppose.

“But they left a legacy of shame that reflects on the rest of the German community [in South Australia]. Unfairly, because most of them were loyal.”

[…]

The journalist Mark Aarons, author of War Criminals Welcome, says the story continued along familiar lines in the decades after the war. Some German [Fascists] and collaborators from eastern Europe found a new home in Australia, and Aarons says he confirmed a group of ex-SS officers set up a clandestine organisation in SA to keep their ideology alive.

Aarons says successive Australian governments sought to avoid asking too many questions about the past, as many former [Fascists] and their collaborators went on to be recruited by intelligence services during the cold war, or became involved in politics.

(Emphasis added. Compare all of this with the Australian state’s suppression of socialists and their materials during the short twentieth century.)

See also: A brief history of Nazism in Australia