What follows is my homage to a personal and professional friend, Konrad Kwiet.
I first met Konrad when I arrived back in Sydney on 24 October 1988 following my return from my first mission with Bob Greenwood, the Director of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) and his chief investigator, Bruce Huggett.
On my return to the SIU headquarters following this mission, I caught the elevator to the SIU’s floor. The office was located on the corner of King and Elizabeth Streets in Sydney in premises formerly occupied by a Royal Commission. When the Commission vacated the premises at the end of its term, very little, if any, structural changes had been made to accommodate the SIU. Consequently, the Commission’s formal hearing room, very much resembling a traditional court room, was still intact.
After exiting the elevator I made my way into the workplace and headed towards my office. When I was making my way down a corridor, I walked past the open doors at the end of the former hearing room. The room was full of boxes and documents spread over various tables and desks. This was not unexpected, however, I did not anticipate the other main feature of the room.
Sitting at the centre of the judicial bench, at the far end of the hearing room, was an imposing individual dressed in a white shirt and waist coat, appearing as if he was presiding over the otherwise empty court room. His head was down studying some paperwork. He became aware of my presence standing at the other end of the room in the open door way. He was a slightly balding, bearded man who I judged to be in his 50s. He was peering at me over the top of his glasses. For a brief moment, I thought I was in the wrong premises. Mystified, I moved on and went to my office.
Very shortly after this encounter, I found out this person was Professor Konrad Kwiet, the SIU’s new chief historian who had been chosen by Greenwood before our departure. Konrad had commenced duty at the SIU in September while I was away with Greenwood and Huggett.
During my working career, I had very little to do with academics. I felt inadequate and intimidated being in their presence. I entertained such fears in relation to Professor Kwiet.
Shortly after our return to Sydney following our long overseas trip, Greenwood horrified me when he announced I was to accompany Professor Kwiet on an archival mission to Germany. Initially it would just be the two of us, although we would meet up with other SIU members later during our travels. We were due to depart in March for a month, to undertake work in several German historical archives located in Berlin, Munich, Freiberg, Ludwigsburg, Koblenz, Bonn and Cologne. The thought of spending time alone with an academic for several weeks filled me with dread.
The journey with Konrad, however, cured me of my fear of academics. It was one of the most pleasant journeys I have ever had. It paved the way for the creation of one of my most cherished friendships which I’m pleased to say, is strong to this day.
Konrad and I developed a positive working relationship very early in the mission, although I was always in his shadow. He knew what he was doing – whereas I was mostly out of my depth. When we were not in the archives, Konrad would ‘show me around’ Germany. He was good company.
In Berlin he introduced me to the local street food – currywurst. He suggested I should sample different varieties at various street vendor carts; he convinced me to try steak tartar in Ludwigsburg; and pork knuckle in Munich. Our friendship was not based on food alone.
Konrad was and is an interesting, intelligent but very pragmatic individual. He has an irreverent and wicked sense of humour. We enjoyed each other’s company at the SIU and I looked forward to every opportunity to travel or be with Konrad. Those sentiments are true to this day.
Konrad during our mission to Moscow in July 1989
Konrad was two years old, living in a remote village in Germany, when news of the Holocaust and the plight of European Jewry filtered through to the rest of the world. These revelations resulted in the famous Joint Allied Declaration being issued on 17 December 1942, condemning the Nazi ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’ and warning that ‘those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution’ [1].
Konrad was the sixth child of a so called privileged mixed marriage, with a Jewish mother and a Christian father [2]. According to the Nuremberg Race Laws he was classified as a Mischling ersten Grades – a half-cast of the first degree, colloquially known as ‘Jew Bastard’. According to Jewish law he can claim to be a Jew, even as a confirmed disbeliever.
As with so many mixed marriages, Konrad parent’s marriage ended in divorce in 1945, once the threat of deportation and extermination had passed. In Hamburg the divorce rate among mixed couples reached 20 percent. He can still vividly remember the end of the war, sitting in a cellar, hearing the noise of aircraft and the nearby detonation of bombs and, afterwards, picking his way through a landscape of ruins and rubble, littered with the bodies of the dead and the injured.
After his parents’ divorce, his father, a medical practitioner, re-married. The childless marriage ended some 20 years later when his wife left him, upon which Konrad’s father committed suicide.
In 1945 his mother resumed her interrupted medical career and moved in a circle of friends who shared her experiences during the Holocaust. The well-known post-war diary of Victor Klemperer contains lengthy entries about his mother and his siblings [3]. Konrad was mentioned only in passing, as ‘Der Kleine’ (the little one).
To lessen the enormous burden of his mother’s child-care responsibilities, Konrad was sent to Holland, to the remaining relatives on his mothers’ side who survived Auschwitz and life in hiding. Growing up in this traumatized German-Dutch-Jewish survivor milieu, and at the same time having to contend with the fierce anti-German sentiments displayed by post-war Dutch society, Konrad was left with some unpleasant childhood memories. His formative years might help explain the career path he later undertook and the historical themes he selected for teaching and research.
In 1949 Konrad returned to an almost ‘Judenrein’ [4] divided Germany. His schooling and university studies were completed in West-Berlin, one of the hot spots of the Cold War.
Frequent, lengthy visits to Amsterdam continued to cement his Dutch connections. They also paved the way for the archival research for his doctoral dissertation, supervised by Hans Herzfeld, a renowned German historian and edited by Martin Broszat. The study dealt with the regime in the Nazi occupied Netherlands.
Konrad received immense support from Louis de Jong, Jacques Presser and other members of the Rijksinstituut voor Orlogsdocumentatie (State Institute for War Documentation or RvO, today called NIOD). While researching the archives he met several young German representatives of the legal fraternity, public prosecutors entrusted with the task of searching for documentary evidence for war crimes investigations and trials assigned to them. He still remembers how some of them complained they had not trained to do this job, while others expressed their concern such work would derail their legal careers.
Konrad’s academic career commenced in 1966, in West Berlin, as the assistant of Professor Ernst Schulin, who remained his mentor until Schulin’s death in 2017. Konrad joined a handful of young German historians who were the first in Germany to research and teach the history of German Jewry, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. They were taught by a visiting professor, Adolf Leschnitzer, once exiled and returning to talk about the ‘German-Jewish Symbiosis’ [5].
The mid 1960s was also a time of unrest and protest. Students and intellectuals launched attacks against the established order, calling for ‘mastering the past,’ demanding that Nazi crimes should be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.
Konrad joined a small circle of radicals who reactivated the old ideas of the Anarcho-Syndicalists and of Rosa Luxemburg. However, as he only had the stomach to throw eggs and tomatoes at university venues and on the streets, but not stones or other dangerous missiles, he was quickly expelled from the hard core of the group. Like so many other young revolutionaries, Konrad retreated into the cocoon of the academic establishment. He profited greatly from his professional discourse with experts in the field including Raul Hilberg, Richard Breitman, Jürgen Matthäus, Colin Tatz and many others.
In 1976 Konrad left Germany again, this time for Australia, where he found a new home. He took up a position at the University of New South Wales in Sydney to build up German and European Studies, of introducing Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies, and later at Macquarie University, Genocide Studies together with Colin Tatz.
From there it was a small step to the history of Nazi war crimes, perpetrated in Europe during World War II when Bob Greenwood asked Konrad to join the Special Investigations Unit as the Unit’s leading historian, a position that Konrad says was the most interesting and rewarding job of his career.
[1] National Archives Australia (NAA), ACT CRS A 981, Germany 37 part 2. Joint Allied Declaration, 17.12.1942,
published in Sydney Morning Herald, 18.12.1942; see Konrad Kwiet, ‘Responses of Australian Jewry’s Leadership to the Holocaust,’ in Jews in the Sixth Continent, ed. W. D Rubinstein (Sydney, London & Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 208.
[2] For the history of ‘Mischlinge’ and ‘Mischehen’ under Nazi rule, see the study by Beate Meyer, ‘Jüdische Mischlinge’:
Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrung 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Dölling & Galitz Verlag, 1999).
[3] Victor Klemperer, The Lesser Evil. The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1945-1959 (City :Orion Publishing, 2004), pp.
254, 257, 281, 288, 289. German edition: So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen, Tagebücher 2 Bde. (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1999).
[4] A Nazi term meaning an area that has been cleansed of Jews.
[5] Adolf Leschnitzer, Saul and David. Die Problematik der deutsch-jüdischen Lebensgemeinschaft. (Heidelberg:
Schneider, 1994).
Konrad in the Prague Military Archive in March 1990
Konrad’s academic work generally, and specifically at the SIU, where he was often the first historian in the word to gain access to never before seen Nazi war time documentation, propelled him to the position of one of the world’s leading and highly regard international experts on the Holocaust. To date he has published ten books and has produced over 100 articles and commentaries.
Konrad lives in Sydney with his lovely wife Jane and their children and growing number of grandchildren. He spends most of his time working at the Sydney Jewish Museum where he is the resident historian, having helped develop its accurate historical framework which led to the Museum’s creation more than 25 years ago. As the Museum has grown and developed over the years, Konrad has assisted in ensuring the authenticity and accuracy of its historical collections and displays, in particular relating to the Holocaust and the events during and after World War II. It is fair to say that Konrad himself is an institution at the Museum.
I feel honoured and very proud to call Konrad a close friend.