The Wollongong Art Gallery is grappling with shock revelations a prize donor with a gallery named after him was likely a Nazi collaborator before emigrating to Australia in 1950 from Lithuania.
Bronius "Bob" Sredersas donated about 100 works by revered Australian artists including Grace Cossington Smith and Arthur Streeton to the Wollongong Art Gallery in 1976.
He died in 1982.
Despite working as a steelworker at Port Kembla, he meticulously collected the paintings, reportedly saving money by declining to drink alcohol, gamble or start a family.
But after an anniversary in 2018 to celebrate the gallery's 40th birthday and the central role Sredersas played in its establishment, former councillor Michael Samaras noticed he was described as a policeman for the Lithuanian government's Department of Security.
He was suspicious and decided to investigate.
"When all the publicity happened for the 40th anniversary of the gallery there was media, including on the ABC Illawarra webpage about the fact that he was a policeman in Lithuania before the war," he said.
"The Wollongong City Library local studies section has a whole three boxes of material on him so I got his birth certificate."
Mr Samaras then searched archives in Canberra, Germany, the United States and eventually original documents from Lithuania.
Genocide in Lithuania
Director of the Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff, said it was clear when the gallery was named after Mr Sredersas those in charge did not know about his past.
"There were 220,000 Jews living under the Nazi occupation in Lithuania, of whom 212,000 were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators," Dr Zuroff, a specialist in the killing operations in Lithuania and Eastern Europe, said
"Believe it or not there were less than a thousand Germans in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation, so how was it possible for them to murder so many people using the method of shooting?
"The answer is very simple. There was a large number of zealous volunteers who volunteered to serve with the Nazi forces and did a huge amount of the shootings themselves," he said.
Uncovering this history has put Wollongong Council, the owner of the gallery, on the back foot.
The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies has written to Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery offering to work with the council and the Sydney Holocaust Museum to investigate the claims.
The Lord Mayor says his first concern is that the serious matters had apparently been ignored by council prompting Michael Samaras to take his concerns to the Guardian newspaper.
He also says he's willing to work with the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and the Australian Federal Police acknowledging such a monstrous allegation cannot be ignored.
"That has to be dealt with in a way that does not hide the past, recognises the allegations if they are proven and how we deal with the Sredersas Collection and how that's represented or interpreted," Mr Bradbery said.
In the meantime, Dr Zuroff has suggested council remove the name of Bob Sredersas from the gallery.
"No-one wants to honour people who are participants in the worst genocide in history of mankind. The people who made the decision to name the gallery were not aware at the time of this man's war record," he said.
"I think it's important that a decision is made to remove his name and it's basically a statement that we do not want to honour people who participate in the crimes of the Holocaust."
