The first public rally was held here today by the Australian National Party. Complete with jackbooted and brown-shirted troopers, the meeting in a Melbourne public park, lasted exactly 15 minutes before a continued uproar from a hostile crowd forced its closing.
The principal speech was delivered by Juria von Rand, “state leader” and national organizing secretary of the Australian neo-Nazis. He outlined his party’s “policy” from a mound bedecked with swastika-painted rocks. Von Rand, who came to Australia from Germany eight years ago, said that one of his party’s main aims was “to justify many of Hitler’s policies.” He said that Hitler “was not as evil as he was painted.”
Concerning Jews, he said his party was “not violently anti-Semitic, but we don’t believe that anything like six million Jews were killed in Germany and, anyway, most of them were probably criminal types or diseased.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
