From the Oz:

Nazi leader was ‘Hicks of his day’: son
Dan Box
June 08, 2007

THE son of the former national Nazi Party leader hopes a new book will help to resurrect his father’s reputation, 60 years after he was declared “Australia’s Public Enemy No1″ and deported.
Heini Becker, a former South Australian MP, said there were direct parallels between the experience of his father, who was held captive for seven years at various prison camps, and that of David Hicks.

Like the authors of The Hitler Club, to be published next month, Mr Becker said his father, Johannes Becker, a German doctor who arrived in Australia as a 29-year-old in 1927, was persecuted as a result of the nation’s prejudice before and after World War II.

Becker’s family was ostracised and his children subjected to bullying at school, an experience shared by Hicks’s two teenage children.

“I can sympathise with those two young ones because I’ve been there,” Mr Becker said. “I remember coming home from school in tears because I was bullied about my father, saying I never wanted to go back.

“He was made a scapegoat. People in the Barossa Valley really paid for the high profile that was given my father and the innocent really suffered.

“If we are not careful today, with terrorism and the misunderstanding of religious life, we could end up again a very divided community.”

Johannes Becker saw Adolf Hitler speak in 1922, and subsequently became a willing member of the Nazi Party. He travelled to Germany in 1933, where he met Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, a staff member of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, and was appointed chief organiser of the party in Australia.

His party membership, however, had ended before war broke out and, at best, his local “Hitler Club”, as it was known to the intelligence service, numbered only a few dozen members.

A photograph of this club, taken one Sunday afternoon in 1934 - the exact date is now unknown - shows eight seemingly unexceptional men gathered on the Gomersal Road, which runs west from Tanunda, in the Barossa Valley. The men, dressed in suits buttoned against the cold weather, stand on either side of a gum tree, with the Nazi flag wrapped proudly around the trunk.

Becker is believed to have been the man behind the camera.

Despite their limited influence, the Australian security service, justice system and media seemed determined to condemn him as the face of the war enemy, the book argues.

When war broke out in 1939, Becker, as a German national, was interned and, in 1947, made headlines when he tried, unsuccessfully, to escape while being deported to Germany.

Newspapers at the time described him as “Australia’s Public Enemy No1″ and “Australia’s No1 Nazi”. He was never to return to Australia after his deportation in 1947, dying in Germany in 1961 at the age of 63.

Andrew Moore, associate professor of history at the University of Western Sydney, said Becker’s influence was much more limited than that of Colonel Eric Campbell, whose far-right New Guard numbered about 30,000 people at the same time. “The New Guard was very active in NSW in the 1930s,” Professor Moore said. “It was incipiently fascist, then it became explicitly fascist.”

Like Johannes Becker, Campbell travelled to Germany in an attempt to meet Nazi leaders. Unlike his contemporary, however, Campbell, a native Australian, was able to dodge the calls for his internment and build a career as a NSW country town solicitor.