Photo: TVNZ / Screenshot
When Willi Huber died last August at the age of 96 his life was celebrated as an alpine pioneer of Canterbury’s Mt Hutt ski area, a man who gave much back to the community.
But the Austrian who came here after the World War II lied on his immigration forms to turn his back on a dark past.
He spent seven decades in New Zealand before he mentioned that he was in the Waffen SS - it was first revealed on the TVNZ Sunday programme in 2017.
That rang alarm bells with military historian and journalist Andy Macdonald, who realised there was an untold story here.
"It was a hundred percent obvious that he was Waffen SS. And there were other things that he said that would strain credulity, such as he was unaware of the events of the Holocaust, war crimes and that sort of thing while on the Russian front and in the most indoctrinated Nazi units around."
Macdonald then worked with journalist Naomi Arnold to produce a major story for the June issue of North and South that’s been months in the making.
Macdonald tells The Detail how he dug into Huber's past, searching military archives in Germany and tapping into sources and other writers there to flesh out the details.
He was up against tough privacy laws in Germany and looking into a sensitive period of history but he was able to prove that the information was in the public interest.
But the "smoking gun" was uncovered in Immigration New Zealand documents. He lied to get into the country and lied every time he left the country and returned.
Macdonald says that fact is important.
"Some of the flak that's come from various quarters, social media, has been that he was a young man caught up in events beyond his control. Sure, maybe that is so but equally he was a volunteer, he did serve in the wartime Waffen SS and I'm very comfortable that we've given him a very fair hearing and drawn reasonable conclusions about how much he did know."
But why drag up a man’s past when he has made a new life in a new country – and that life is now over?
Articles after his death largely focused on the achievements in his life, but then there was a backlash from people unhappy with what hadn’t been said – a very different story than he’d told most people.
Then, another backlash over the North and South story which one correspondent said had loaded shame on his innocent family – ‘that’s cruel’, he said.
Naomi Arnold tells Sharon Brettkelly the spectrum of responses is a sign that Huber’s life really did need to be written about. “There was a lot here that hadn’t been fully acknowledged or explored,” she says
North and South editor Rachel Morris says an agonising discussion and effort went into the magazine cover's headline and illustration of a man looking at the mountains with a Nazi flag behind his back.
"We spent hours talking about, like how to put a Nazi flag on the cover of a magazine without it being sensationalist ... or glorifying the Nazi flag."
