Last week, 97-year-old Cantabrian Willi Huber, a decorated Nazi officer lauded for his role in the establishment of Mt Hutt ski field, died. Juliet Moses says it is an indictment on this country that there has been no real reckoning with his past.
Cantabrian Willi Huber died last week. If you’re not a skier, you may not have heard of him. I’m not, but his name was seared in my mind when I first heard it in 2017.
That’s when TVNZ featured him in its Sunday programme, lavishing praise on him as a Mt Hutt ski “pioneer” and “father of the mountain”. This did not pique my interest so much as the fact that he was also, in Cameron Bennett’s words, a “remarkable survivor” of World War II. Was he a Kiwi fighter pilot who fought for the RAF in the Battle of Britain? Or perhaps a survivor of a concentration camp? Why, no! He was a decorated Nazi officer – an Austrian who volunteered for the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front, moving here in the 1950s.
The SS was the Nazi regime’s paramilitary branch, responsible for policing its racial policy and running its concentration camps. The Waffen-SS was its combat unit. Under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler, it ran separately from the German army.
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