Barrister to meet with Holocaust survivors after Dutton-Nazi retweet

Julian Burnside will meet Holocaust survivors in response to his retweet of an image of Peter Dutton dressed as a Nazi.

Holocaust survivor Moshe Fiszman, 96, at his home in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield yesterday. Picture: Aaron Francis

Prominent barrister Julian Burnside will meet Holocaust survivors in response to growing anger at his decision to retweet an image of Peter Dutton dressed as a Nazi, a move described by the Home Affairs Minister as “a ­humiliating and belated backtrack”.

Mr Burnside has apologised to anyone who was offended by the picture, but told The Australian he did not regret the Dutton-Nazi photo he shared on Twitter.

In the retweet, Mr Dutton’s face was superimposed on that of a Nazi official in a uniform which included the “death’s head” emblem used by the SS unit responsible for concentration camps.

Mr Dutton said the decision to meet Holocaust survivors was a “humiliating and belated backtrack from Mr Burnside”.

“He has no self-awareness and the fact is he offended many within the Jewish community. His comments were deplorable,” Mr Dutton said.

Mr Burnside said he never made links between the Australian government and the Holocaust. “My concern is to remind people that the way the Nazis thought, and in particular the way they distorted public opinion to encourage fear and hatred of Jews, is worth remembering these days,” he said.

“I am sorry to have upset ­people who thought, mistakenly, that I was referring to the Holocaust in my retweet. I was not.”

Mr Burnside said he accepted the Anti-Defamation Commission’s invitation to meet Holocaust survivors out of “common courtesy” and because he wanted to meet people who remembered the lead up to the Holocaust. “I hope he will have a recollection of the way anti-Semitism developed during the 1930s,” he said.

Mr Burnside will meet Moshe Fiszman, 96, a Holocaust survivor who said he wanted to tell him not to use as a political prop the Nazis that killed his family.

“My family was murdered with poisonous gas ... I watched babies being torn out of their mothers’ arms and thrown into fires,” Mr Fiszman said.

“No Australian can be compared to Nazism ... us few survivors are very upset about this.”

Mr Fiszman was born in ­Poland and spent 5½ years in Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau from where he was saved in May 1945. He still remembers the two numbers that substituted for his name.

He hopes to take Mr Burnside on a tour of Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre where the 96-year-old still works as a guide.

“I think Mr Burnside does not understand the Holocaust. He is a smart man, a man with a rich ­vocabulary,” Mr Fiszman said. “A man with such a rich vocabulary should not have to use the Nazis as a prop ... no one should do that.”

The Australian understands Mr Burnside has also faced pressure from his colleagues, with at least one Jewish lawyer asking the barrister privately to apologise for the Dutton retweet.

Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich organised the meeting, on a yet-to-be confirmed date, and thanked Mr Burnside for taking up his invitation. “We appreciate that Mr Burnside accepted our invitation, and hope that after hearing Moshe Fiszman’s inspiring story that he understands the pain that he has caused,” he said.