‘I am Bob. Just Bob’: could a Wollongong folk hero have had a Nazi past?

Nobody had reason to pay undue attention to Bronius "Bob" Sredersas after he arrived in Wollongong in 1950, one among thousands of post-war European migrants who helped grow the Illawarra's Port Kembla steelworks into the biggest in the Commonwealth.

Sredersas, 39 when he arrived in Australia aboard the Fairsea liner, initially lived for two years at Unanderra migrant hostel. He then bought a small block and built a house in what was Hoskins Street, Cringila - a humble Wollongong workers' suburb of unmade roads and fibros in the shadows of the steelworks' monolithic, ever-exhaling smoke stacks and blast furnaces.

The quiet Lithuanian daily walked the couple of hundred metres to the steelworks where he toiled, initially as a labourer and later as a crane driver, until his retirement at 65 in 1975. Sredersas - "Mr Bob" to Cringila locals - kept to himself. He avoided the rowdy, bustling pubs of Port Kembla, nightly jammed with post-shift steelworkers and wharfies for the six o'clock swill. He steered clear of the horses, wasn't interested in football or cricket.

A devout Catholic, he worshipped regularly, tended his cabbages, roses and lemons at the tiny cottage he shared with his cat, Mitzi. On weekends he'd cycle down to Port Kembla harbour to fish and later share his catch with Mitzi.

Neighbours and local kids were fond of him. A neighbour of 24 years once recounted: "My two girls loved him. All the local children played in his garden. His pockets were always full of sweets and when a child hurt itself while playing, it would run to Mr Bob for sympathy."

Kind, gentle, avuncular, distinctive in his dark beret and often with pipe or cigarette in mouth, Bob Sredersas was the model citizen - and the ideal migrant success story.

People about Cringila would occasionally observe him returning from the station carrying brown paper packages. Without a family to raise and having avoided drinking his earnings, on days off from the steelworks he would catch the old diesel train to Sydney where, from 1956, he attended fine art auctions. Using McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art as a guide, he amassed during the next two decades an extraordinary collection of Australian fine visual art, including paintings by Grace Cossington Smith, Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston, William Ashton, Henry Buckmaster and Norman Lindsay.

All available wall space in his cottage was adorned with his remarkable collection. He also owned many ivory pieces and Indigenous works from Papua New Guinea. But after a break-in and the theft of some works, and cognisant that he had nobody to leave the art to, from 1976 he made the benefaction that unavoidably thrust him into the limelight of local and national celebration: he gave the entire collection of some 100 works to the city of Wollongong.

Sredersas has since been celebrated by the city and the Australian Lithuanian community, including with special guest lectures and dinners, with a gallery space in his name, a special plaque honouring his generosity, and with several exhibitions. He has been lauded in local and state media, his bequest shorthanded simply as "The Gift".

Sredersas' philanthropy, upon which the city built a fine art collection and opened the Wollongong Art Gallery (one of regional Australia's finest) in 1978, earned him an almost mythical status as a cultural hero - the selfless migrant intent on repaying the community that harboured him from war-ravaged Europe.

"I have nobody but the people of Wollongong to leave them [the artworks] to. They are for the young people to learn, for old people to enjoy, and for me it's the realisation of a life's dedication," Sredersas said.

"It was always my dream to see paintings in a gallery here. When I came to Wollongong there were many factories, buildings and bridges. People before me had built them. But I too can do something for future generations. You must not forget that we are only temporarily in this world but the human race will stay. Something must be done for future generations, future citizens."

But four decades after his death, a more sinister picture of Sredersas' life is emerging, a life he concealed from those that knew him in Australia.

In 2018, former Wollongong councillor Michael Samaras suspected something was not quite right with the Sredersas story and started digging. This summer he uncovered new archival evidence from Lithuania suggesting that during the second world war Sredersas served in the intelligence arm of the Nazi SS, which was instrumental in systematically slaughtering 212,000 Lithuanian Jews.

If the evidence can be upheld, should Sredersas' name be stripped from the regional gallery that built itself on his gift? Should the plaque at the gallery be removed or amended to explain the institution's most prized collection was donated by an apparent Nazi collaborator and possible war criminal? Is it even possible to distinguish the collection from the man, who in his new life in Australia managed to mystify his war years?

The City of Wollongong - and its exceptional art gallery - has much to contemplate.

The Gift inevitably brought Bob Sredersas the type of attention he'd always carefully evaded. His almost four decades in Europe - especially his war years - were at best enigmatic. "Bronius Sredersas chose not to talk about his youth, his experiences in the second world war and as a displaced person. He simply preferred to consider that his life began with his arrival in Australia," reads an essay in a 1989 Wollongong City Gallery (now Wollongong Art Gallery) exhibition catalogue about Sredersas.

To mark its 40th anniversary in 2018 the gallery mounted an exhibition, The Gift - Remembering Bob Sredersas. Its catalogue essay tells of a man born to a privileged family in 1910 in Simferopol, on the Crimean peninsula, on 4 December 1910, who grew up in newly independent Lithuania and as a young man worked for the state police in criminal intelligence.

Mystery and intrigue now seem an understatement amid the emerging evidence about his wartime activities. In a place where perhaps half of the employees in the local industry - especially the steelworks - were "new Australians" who had arrived soon after the war, and the understated Lithuanian always seemed to avoid answering a critical question while alive: what, precisely, did you do in the war, Bob?

In death, he was close to beatified, his reputation for beneficence enhanced when he bequeathed his Cringila home to the local Catholic archdiocese "for assisting and educating underprivileged and destitute children".

The Sredersas legacy for modest benevolence, for the virtue of hard work and humility, and for thanking a community that gave him a new life, was irresistible for the town built on steel and the sweat of migrants.

"Bob Sredersas' story is probably the most gentle and beautiful of all the folklore that migrants have established in the steel town," reads an article in a 1985 special edition magazine celebrating the 100th anniversary of steelworks owner BHP.

This folklore became central to Wollongong's view of itself. The thing about folklore, of course, is that its bedrock is often myth - story. And story often turns out to be quite different to truth and the raw materials of so much sound history: documentary evidence.

Testimony to the enduring reverence for the old man is manifest in the Sredersas Gallery in the city's art gallery. Upstairs in the gallery (elegantly transformed from the city's former council chambers) a wall plaque celebrates "The Bob Sredersas Gift". Celebratory dinners were held in his name and occasional historical lectures delivered in his honour (including by Barry Jones and Donald Horne).

The local studies section of the Wollongong Library also celebrates Sredersas. Its collection includes three curated boxes of his personal documentation (including birth certificates and migration papers) as well as his prosaic accoutrements - eye glasses and pipe, beret and crucifix.

Wollongong attained something like peak Bob Sredersas with the 40th anniversary of the city's art gallery in 2018. There was a resurgence of media coverage about Sredersas's life and times, and a special exhibition to honour him. The gallery even elaborately recreated part of his home (replete with Australian masterpieces on the walls and with other brown paper-wrapped works stacked at floor level) in a tribute akin to the Tweed Regional Gallery's celebration of Margaret Olley's life and work.

An evocative video was produced. It features an actor playing Sredersas speaking of his gift. "I am Bob. Just Bob," the Sredersas character says.

But now it seems that wasn't true. He was, apparently, much more.

That is when 58-year-old Samaras, the son of a Greek immigrant father who worked as an industrial painter at the steelworks, and born and bred in Wollongong, started to become deeply suspicious.

"I decided to find out for myself exactly who he really was," Samaras says.

From the time of The Gift, when Michael Samaras was about 12, he lived in a Wollongong reverent of Sredersas. "I read the local paper, the Illawarra Mercury, every day as a kid. So, yes, I knew the story of Sredersas and The Gift intimately - it had been repeated and repeated and repeated. He became such an important figure in the local community and he still is," says Samaras, a former Labor member of Wollongong council and longtime supporter of the gallery, as we drive about his old town, where his father still lives.

We stop outside Sredersas's old house, paint peeling off its window frames and rust eating the guttering. At the bottom of the street is one of the many gates into the steelworks, its monolithic chimneys belching smoke. Today it employs barely 2,000 people, compared with 22,000 in its heyday when Sredersas was there.

We drive out of Sredersas's old street towards Port Kembla, past thoroughfares named in honour of other proud steel cities: Birmingham Street, Bethlehem Street, Newcastle Street. There is also a Steel Street.

We drive through Port Kembla's heart along Wentworth Street, past those old workers' pubs that Sredersas avoided so he could buy art instead, past elegant cafes and shops selling clothes and antiques that signal a renaissance in this part of the Illawarra.

We stop along the harbour, where fishermen stand with their rods (as Sredersas once did) on the rocks with their backs to the steelworks: a melange of russet and sable and coal-black metallic horizontals and colliding verticals of conveyors, warehouses, cranes, smoke stacks and walkways. White fumes twist and bellow skywards.

"During all that publicity for the 40th anniversary of the gallery," Samaras says, "there was mention that Sredersas had been a police officer in Lithuania [before the German occupation]. And that's what made me think, 'Hang on - I know what the auxiliary police battalions got up to in Lithuania: they murdered the Jews. It was as if an alarm bell went off in my head."

Samaras was especially struck by a local ABC article at the time. It included the thought-provoking lines: "The apparent double life of the Lithuanian migrant, who went from being an intelligence officer in his home country to a steelworker in New South Wales, remains shrouded in mystery 36 years after his death.

"Mr Sredersas came from a middle-class family in the northern European country and went on to work as a policeman for the Lithuanian government's department of security, where he was tasked with monitoring Soviet military activity. His involvement with the civil service ended abruptly in 1940 when the Russians invaded Lithuania, prompting Mr Sredersas to flee, in fear for his life, to Germany."

Samaras went through the archive at the Wollongong Library to confirm, via the translated Russian identity documents, Sredersas's personal details - including his christening name (Bronislav Schreders), date of birth (4 December 1910), place of birth (Simferopol, Crimea), and his parents' particulars. Samaras sent these details to the Lithuanian Special Archive in Vilnius together with "Bronius Sredersas", the (Lithuanian) name on his migration papers for entry to Australia in 1950. Samaras asked for any details about Schreders/Sredersas in Lithuania during the period 1940-44.

The Lithuanian archive includes Russian KGB files. The KGB archives, most of which were collated after the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania from the Nazis in 1944, have detailed dossiers - based in part on records of interviews with Nazi collaborators and abandoned German records of those who served the Third Reich in implementing anti-Jewish (Holocaust) and anti-Russian policies.

It is a long-accepted part of the Sredersas life story that he worked as a policeman in an intelligence unit before the first Soviet occupation.

"His safety was at risk as a result of his employment by the Lithuanian security department in monitoring military activity prior to the invasion," according to the Wollongong City Gallery's 1989 exhibition catalogue.

Sredersas emerges in all the publicity about his life post-The Gift as opaque about his war years. He was vague about whether he'd fled to Germany along with many Lithuanian nationalists after the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania in August 1940, which ended with the Nazi invasion of June-July 1941 - or after the Soviet reoccupation of Lithuania in July 1944. (Having worked for Lithuanian intelligence, he would certainly have been a target.)

According again to that exhibition catalogue, Sredersas was apparently "labouring on the riverboats in Kaunas", Lithuania's temporary capital, in 1944.

Regardless, after the war he was registered as a displaced person, migrated to Australia and lived an unassuming, modest life based on hard work and gratitude towards his adoptive country.

A long-time associate of Sredersas reportedly said: "He was wanted at times by the Russians and the Germans, so it's pretty cloudy as to what his movements were in the war years."

Cloudy indeed. Until, that is, officials at the Lithuanian archives responded to Samaras this summer. The records they produced - an application form, resume and related documents on SS stock - bear the name Bronislaw Shroeders rather than Bronislav Shreders, but the remaining details - date and place of birth and parents' names - match up with the birth records.

"The documents show Sredersas was employed by the SD - Sicherheitsdienst - which was the intelligence agency of the [Nazi] SS [Schutzstaffel]. I also received a copy of his enlistment papers for the SS," Samaras says.

During the German occupation of Lithuania from June 1941 to July 1944 the Nazis - abetted by Lithuanian authorities, including the state's police services and the SD - killed 96.4% (212,000) of the country's Jews, most in the latter part of 1941 but also until the Soviet reoccupation in 1944. The Lithuanian police auxiliaries were so effective at shooting Jews en masse that some were deployed to other countries including Ukraine and Belarus to carry out mass killing of Jewish people and to guard concentration camps.

Initially Samaras used an online translation tool to interpret the Lithuanian archival documents that implicate Sredersas. To further verify them, he sent the documents to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Efraim Zuroff, the world's leading "Nazi hunter" who has traced surviving and dead alleged second world war German war criminals to numerous countries, including Australia. Zuroff confirmed to Samaras that the documents show Sredersas worked for the SD and applied to join the SS. They don't indicate if the application was successful.

Zuroff told the Guardian: "In 1943, he was working as a criminal investigator in Kovno [Kaunas] for the SD. By 7 November 1943, he had acquired German citizenship and applied to join the SS as a volunteer. In summation, he was an active participant in enforcing German directives and orders, and most likely was able to join the Waffen-SS, where he very likely participated in Holocaust crimes.

"The fact that in 1943, he worked as a criminal investigator for the German Sicherheitsdienst in Kaunas means that he was involved in implementing German policy regarding the Jews, ie the Holocaust. The question is how long did he serve there? If, for example, he already served there in the second half of 1941, when most of the murders of Jews in Lithuania were carried out, then there is no doubt about his involvement in Holocaust crimes."

"Any person who served in the SD in Kaunas almost certainly was involved in the persecution and murder of Jews. If he served there during the period from July 1941 until the end of November 1941, there's no doubt whatsoever. But even if he only served in that unit later, it's a reasonable assumption that he was involved in mistreating the Jews," Zuroff says.

"As far as serving in the Waffen-SS, that might have included mistreatment of 'enemies of the Reich' as well, but not necessarily. In any event those units were fighting for a victory of the Third Reich, the most genocidal regime in history."

According to Sredersas' International Refugee Organization papers held at the National Archives of Australia, he was consistently in Lithuania until the Soviet reoccupation in 1944, though from August 1940 he insisted he was largely unemployed (with the exception of six months to June 1944, when he says he was a "seaman").

This is at odds with his apparent application to join the Waffen-SS as a volunteer in November 1943 when he listed his current place of work as "SD" - the intelligence organisation of the SS.

In January Samaras alerted the Wollongong Art Gallery's director, John Monteleone, to the documents about Sredersas and Zuroff's interpretation of them. There is no suggestion that until the gallery - and then council - received these documents and Zuroff's assessment that they or anyone else knew of suggestions Sredersas was a member of the SD, had applied to join the SS or could have been involved in anti-Jewish Holocaust activities during the war.

Samaras suggested the gallery consult an expert to examine the documents (possibly the Sydney Jewish Museum or Zuroff) and to reconsider its close association with the Sredersas name.

"As you know I am a supporter of the Wollongong Art Gallery and understand that this information will come as a shock to many people," Samaras wrote to Monteleone.

"Once you have had time to consider, I suggest we talk again to consider the best way to make this information public, and the next appropriate steps."

The gallery director said he would consult the council, which operates the gallery.

A week later a council bureaucrat wrote to Samaras: "Thank you for the information - I understand you are deeply concerned about the gallery's reputation. On balance, given the lack of clear evidence in this case, it is not deemed appropriate for council - as a local government body - to undertake such an investigative role as suggested. As such, council does not propose to take any further steps in this matter as this time."

On Friday, a council spokesperson said it would not be appropriate for the council to comment on allegations made against a private individual: "Council understands it would be the responsibility of the federal police to investigate such allegations."

In relation to Sredersas' bequest it said that "standard industry processes were followed for the donation of these artworks. As a result, these artworks were accepted in good faith."

Asked for comment, Monteleone did not personally respond, but the council spokesperson said the council's response also represented the position of the gallery.

Samaras is not satisfied.

"I want them to address this properly. That is not going to happen overnight - I know that. They are a public institution and they need to go through a process - a journey. I think they should get a report written perhaps by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre or by the Sydney Jewish Museum that actually explains what happened in Lithuania and puts the documents in context so that the story is properly understood.

"They can then engage the community, which knows the Sredersas legend, and say, 'Well we honoured this man for 46 years but we don't think it's appropriate to honour him anymore'. They should change the name of the room from the Sredersas Gallery and take down the plaque that honours him. Then they have to tell the story of who he really was."

Wollongong's beloved story about its modest philanthropist, its fairytale about the humble migrant who gave back in spades to the city that adopted him from wartorn Europe, has just become a whole lot more complicated.

It also potentially imbues The Gift with a sinister dimension, one that was, of course, near impossible to anticipate when Sredersas bequeathed it.

"If he thought the gift would soothe his conscience, I hope it didn't work," Samaras says, as we sit by the Port Kembla harbour. "I hope he was tormented by nightmares about the children murdered and buried in the forests of Lithuania."