Strange Discrimination By
p. 46 · Read in the full issue
Germans And Communists
Strange Discrimination By Australian Bureaucrats
AS an example of how the Australian laws relating to nationality are ad ministered we quote the case of Mr.
George Janke, who is now a resident of Sydney.
Mr. Janke was born in Queensland early in this century, and he went to New Guinea with his father in 1906. There fore he had Australian citizenship, but his father was still a German national, although he had been some years in Aus tralia. His father retired from New Guinea in 1912, to live in Australia.
When World War I came in 1914, George Janke joined what was called the German Citizen Soldiers in New Guinea.
He did not fight—he was in another dis trict when the Australians landed near Rabaul. George and his brother were allowed to remain in New Guinea during World War I; they lived there during the long period between wars; and th6y were brought to Australia for internment in 1942. Later, George was released from Tatura and “manpowered” into a leather factory in Sydney, where he spent the remainder of the war years.
Although George Janke has never seen Europe, and cannot speak any language except English, the bureaucrats insist that he is not an Australian. He has made repeated applications to return to the only country ne knows—New Guinea — but the inscrutable powers that be will not permit it, and George is therefore still a more or less skilled worker in the wilderness of Sydney. His brother, how ever, has been allowed to return to New Guinea, The case is somewhat similar to that of Mr. O. Soltwedel. Apart from spells in internment during both World Wars, Soltwedel spent 36 years continuously in New Guinea, and finally was shipped
away to a Germany that he had not seen since he was a youngster under Kaiser Wilhelm.
We do not know whether Janke and Soltwedel were Nazis. Presumably, they had expressed pro-Nazi sentiments at some time. But why the Australian bureaucrats should so savagely punish the now defeated Nazis, while tenderly cherishing and protecting Communists— who are by far Australia’s worst enemies —is something that no man of ordinary reason can comprehend.