Frank Knopfelmacher

Frank Knopfelmacher (Vienna, 3 February 1923 – Melbourne, 17 May 1995), was a Czech Jew, who migrated to Australia in 1955 and became a psychology lecturer and anticommunist political commentator at the University of Melbourne. He was embroiled in virulent political controversies during the Vietnam War-era, the 1960s and 1970s.

He was born into an upper-middle-class Czech Jewish family in Vienna and enjoyed a happy childhood until the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria in 1938. Realising the personal danger, he fled the country in November 1939 with other members of a Zionist youth group, to join a kibbutz in Palestine. In January 1942 he joined the Communist Party and spent the remainder of World War II as a member of the Free Czech Forces, attached to the British Army. The family that he had left in Vienna all perished in the Holocaust.

Once Prague, where he had returned in 1945, had been taken over by the Communists. Reading Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon had soured him from them, and he used money from his family estate to bribe officials into letting him flee to England. He thereafter detested the Soviet Union and continued to revere the man Karl Marx, whom, as late as July 1983, he defended, in a Quadrant article).

Knopfelmacher completed a doctorate in philosophy and psychology at the University of Bristol. In 1955, he moved to Melbourne and took up a lectureship at University of Melbourne's Psychology Department.

...
Wikipedia