In 1994, Paul Bartrop published his first book on the topic of Australia and the Holocaust, based on his doctoral thesis. This current book, his magnus opus, seeks to complement, restructure, and expand the previous work, based on an additional three decades of research. Drawing on detailed research in the National Archives of Australia as well as other Australian and overseas archives and extensive study of the relevant secondary sources, Bartrop has produced a detailed and powerful account of Australian policies regarding Jewish refugee migration in the 1930s, extending this into the war years and beyond with further focus on the Nuremberg trials, the hunt for Nazi war criminals in the 1980s, and the question of memory of the Holocaust.

There has been an ongoing debate among Australian historians in terms of whether the Australian policies were discriminatory, or whether the Australian government assisted Jewish refugees to the greatest extent possible at the time. During the 1980s, a number of scholars, including Andrew Marcus, Michael Blakeney, and this reviewer published articles and books on this topic, with additional research being undertaken by Cyril Pearl, Bartrop himself, and Charlotte Carr-Greg, in which they detailed Australian discriminatory policies before, during, and after the war, presenting a very negative picture of the government's decisions during this period. In response, W.D. (Bill) Rubinstein published an article entitled “Australia and the Refugee Jews of Europe, 1933-1954: A Dissenting View” (Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, Vol. 10, No. 6 (May 1989): 500–523) in which he argued that the findings of these scholars are “seriously, if not fundamentally, flawed” because they are “ahistorical,” and he repeated some of these arguments in his review of the book at hand (Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1 (November 2022): 138–140). In terms of the prewar period, Rubinstein stressed it is easy to write with hindsight, but that at the time no-one could have imagined Auschwitz before the Holocaust. In addition, he argued that Australia did not have a tradition of accepting refugees, the country was just coming out of the Great Depression, the Australian Jewish community did not have an umbrella body to advocate on behalf of Jewish refugees, and the refugees were German, and Australia was just coming out having fought the Great War with Germany. Added to this was the fact that all migration to Australia to that point had been Anglo-Celtic, so that Rubinstein claimed that the admission of 7,000-10,000 Jewish refugees was actually breaking with that tradition. In analysing the war years, he stressed that it was not possible for Jews to escape from Nazi-dominated Europe, and given the distance to Australia he claimed it was “fanciful” (516) to imagine that Jewish refugees could manage to arrive in Australia during the war years. Rubinstein later developed his thesis to apply not only to Australia but the remainder of the free world as well (The Myth of Rescue [1999]).

While Bartrop does not deal directly with Rubinstein's arguments, he argues that Australia's record should be assessed according to the standards of the time, so firstly, whether Australia claimed its policies were non-discriminatory but that this was not the case; secondly, whether Jewish refugees were rejected despite meeting the government's own criteria; and finally, whether the Australian public “was deliberately deceived over certain aspects of the government's policy, this too is a fair basis for evaluating those who framed and executed the Australian position in 1938” (47). He then builds the case, clearly and logically, that all three issues applied to the Australian policies both in the 1930s and during the war years. He demonstrates that the government consistently insisted that there was no discrimination on the basis of race or religion but, in fact, was discriminating against Jews. He provides as a comparison the government's 1938 policy of assisting non-Jewish Dutch immigration and the Swiss program introduced in 1939. Yet, at the same time, as was stated in a memorandum of August 17, 1938 by Assistant Minister Victor Thompson, of the many Jewish refugee applicants who were “independent non-guaranteed migrants who fitted into all the government's entrance criteria,” only one in ten was being accepted (63). The rest were either deferred or rejected. Finally, Bartrop argues that the government consistently deceived the public about its policies. For example, when the Minister of the Interior John McEwen announced the supposedly new policy on December 1, 1938, following the Nazi November pogrom (Kristallnacht), of Australia accepting 15,000 refugees over the next three years, McEwen presented this as a liberalization of previous policies. However, the Thompson memorandum demonstrated that a total of 5,100 refugee Jews were already being accepted annually from the different government categories. McEwen made no mention of the Australian High Commission in Australia House, London, and previous prime minister Stanley Bruce's cablegram sent on November 21-22, 1938 advocating a quota of 30,000 over three years – exactly double what the government announced. While the government presented the announcement in a very positive light, Bartrop explains that “Examination of the motives behind the announcement shows it to have been hypocritical rather than humanitarian” (101).

The book's focus is very much on the official, federal government level. Thus, less light is shed on the various policies and projects introduced by the Australian Jewish Welfare Society to ensure the Jewish refugees did not become a charge on the state, including their reaching out for financial assistance from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in 1939. This led to JDC funding through a loan system called Mutual Farms, to settle Jewish refugees on the land, and Mutual Enterprises, to enable the newcomers to establish themselves in business. As well, some important studies, such as Anna Rosenbaum's detailed study of Czechoslovak refugee migration to Australia (The Safe House Down Under [2017]), are not included.

Despite these limitations, The Holocaust and Australia is an important contribution to understanding the failure of the free world to respond to the plight of the Jewish refugees from Nazism during the 1930s. This was further exacerbated by their classification of “enemy alien” during the war years and the British policy of internment and then sending the internees to its former colonies: Canada and Australia.

Without doubt, this book is an important resource for students and scholars wanting to understand Australian reactions and refugee policies to Nazi antisemitism in the 1930s, its internment policies of the war years, and postwar developments, including the Nuremberg trials, the entry of Nazi war criminals into Australia, and Holocaust memory. Paul Bartrop clearly demonstrates that for Australia, as with the rest of the Western world, assisting Jewish refugees in the 1930s was a low priority due to the government's racial preferences. This study is highly recommended as an important addition to understanding the responses of the free, English-speaking world to the events of the Holocaust.