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New Zealand

The revisionist history of an SS Waffen volunteer who became a ski hero in his adopted homeland after the war has been challenged by almost 1500 petitioners, who want honours given Willi Huber at the Mount Hutt resort revoked.

A ski run and related plaque reflect the local view of Huber, who emigrated to the Island nation in 1953 under the guise of a mere German footsoldier, as a founding father of the popular Caterbury resort and pioneer of the sport in NZ. He died on August 9 at age 98.

“He made a new life and a new start here and tried to put [the war] behind him,’’ Mt Hutt Ski Area manager James McKenzie told the website Stuff.

Continued McKenzie: “We are happy to respect his legacy. The context of what he went through in the war, nobody knows for sure what people did way back then.”

However, the Austrian-born Huber was bestowed the Iron Cross for his service during the Battle of Kursk in the Soviet Union with the Waffen-SS. It was the largest tank battle in history that resulted in a disastrous defeat for Hitler’s army in the summer of 1943. Heinrich Himmler, the number 2 Nazi, created the Waffen-SS to function as the military branch of the SS paramilitary. Huber took part in Hitler Youth marches before the 17 year old volunteered for the SS in 1940. At the Nuremberg trials the Waffen-SS was branded a criminal organization responsible for “the persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war.”

Huber downplayed his crimes in the SS to his deathbed, telling a TVNZ program in 2017 “We, as soldiers never, never had the slightest inkling — maybe the high command. It never occurred to us what happened in Germany or Poland.” The show describes Huber as a “remarkable survivor” of World War II.

In response to his act for the cameras, Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said “no way that Mr Huber could not have been aware of the massive atrocities carried out by the SS … it’s clear that Mr. Huber was an unrepentant Nazi, who doesn’t deserve any sympathy or recognition.”

The petition reminded readers that in the TV interview Huber said “I give it to Hitler, he was very clever.”  “This is not a “legacy” to be proud of and is an insult to all those murdered by the Nazis or who died fighting the Nazis”, says the petition. “How lucky Mr Huber was to be able to make a “new start”, something that was not afforded to the victims murdered by the SS.