Austria, where the past is still in motion
Or how not dealing with its Nazi-past is still affecting the political landscape today
With the election results of the 2024 national elections, in which the FPO (Freedom Party of Austria) won the majority of the votes, still reverberating across Austria and Europe it seems that the country has not fully dealt with its rocky past yet. The battle between the shame of being an accomplice to warcrimes to the call for victimhood changing into a fight for being proud to be an Austrian again, Austrian society has never really settled on where they stand…and it shows in its election results.
Austrian political parties in November 2024 are desperately trying to maintain their cordon sanitaire against the FPO because of its far-right ideology or its even more controversial leader Herbert Kickl, but no-one can deny that a large part of Austrian society voted for him and his antics. Even the refusal of the Austrian president to engage with the FPO as long as Kickl is in charge can’t hide the fact that his anti-immigrant and pro-Russian standpoints do not seem to rub voters the wrong way and it is making a lot of Austrians feel awkward towards the rest of Europe.
Kickls’ past rhetoric in which he tried to normalize the Waffen-SS as “just another part of the German military” or called for the building of camps where “asylumseekers could be concentrated” seem to not have cost him any votes however. His statement that “the Law should listen to the Government and not the other way around”, referring to how things work in an authoritarian society, only seemed to gain him more support as a large part of voters in Austria no longer trust the judicial system as it is in their eyes too lenient or leftist.
But how does a country with a past like Austria even get so far as to be so eager to vote for a party like the FPO or a man like Kickl?
Kickl did not come out of a vacuum of course. He was the speechwriter for Jorg Haider, the most well-known foreman of the FPO who has been called the “Austrian Hitler” by the media and the left in the days where Haider was most popular. Haider, now dead after being in a carcrash in 2008, was the face of the far-right in Europe for more than a decade in the late 90s and early 2000s. He even managed to unite other European countries into putting sanctions on Austria as long as he was in power. For years every Thursday thousands of Austrians would protest his government in front of parliament in Vienna. It unearthed an unease amongst a large part of Austrian society about how racism, antisemitism and authoritarianism was still so popular.
In 1938 when Austria voluntarily joined the Third Reich during the so-called “Anschluss” many Austrians felt a return of national pride after having been so “insignificant” since the first world war had ended and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been desolved. Large parts of Austrian society joined the ranks of the elite troops of the SS, many were already card-carrying members of the NSDAP and many more joined. Jews, leftists and Roma were easy targets for a society that had been given the green light to do to them whatever they wanted and even German Nazi leadership was sometimes surprised about the level of enthusiasm Austrian Nazis had for the plans of Hitler for Europe and the Jews.
After the war ended Allied and Soviet forces occupied the country from 1945 up until 1955 and the Austrians found themselves in a situation where they felt they were a victim of the great powers. And even though the Allies and the Soviets had a short period where they implemented denazification efforts and arrested dozens, even hundreds, of former Nazis, it soon became clear that the Cold War would take precedent over any other subjects.
In trying to re-establish a civil society the Allies soon ran into the problem that so many civil servants, cops, mayors and soldiers had served the Nazi regime and were proud NSDAP members that it was impossible to cleanse the civil system of them. It would mean, for instance, replacing one Nazi judge for another or in effect having to replace 80% of the police corps. So in light of that the denazification programs were dropped. At least, in the eyes of the Allied powers, the Nazis had no love for communists and that was very good with the Cold War raging in full effect.
And so across all walks of life former Nazis, and especially SS officers, regained there seats of power in government, the police force and the army. Up until the 1970s it was normal for ex-SS and Wehrmacht officers to wear their original Nazi uniforms in public or on the military bases where they were training new generations of soldiers. Many villages and cities held large gatherings to celebrate the heroic efforts of the Wehrmacht and SS soldiers and their legacy in protecting the homeland from the Soviets.
To make all of this palpable for society consecutive Austrian governments implemented a national program, that would be taught at schools all the way up until the beginning of the 1990s, in which Austria was seen as the first victim of the Third Reich. The “Anschluss” was suddenly not so voluntary and many Austrians had suffered under the German occupation. Intellectuals, Catholic priests and other Austrians had been murdered by the Gestapo, the SS and the Wehrmacht and these people were the example that Austria was a victim and not an accomplice. This program was codified in a book called the Rot-Weiss-Rot buch (Red, White, Red book) which chronicled how Austria had become the first victim of the Third Reich.
The emphasis in this program however lay mostly on people of Christian Austrian descent. Jews and Roma were never mentioned. It was almost as if there were never Jews or Roma in Austria before the “Anschluss”. And if the concentration camps were mentioned they were specifically called “German camps”. The murder of communists and leftists union members were also simply left out of the history books. To keep the victimhood alive it had to be pure-bred Austrians who had suffered under the German regime.
And it was not only the right-wing conservative parties that supported these programs. The social-democrats were just as willing to take on the mantle of victimhood as a large part of their own leadership had been NSDAP members themselves.
Several internationally published scandals occured throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s when journalists uncovered the past membership of the Nazi party or even membership of the SS of a prime-minister, or other members of cabinet from different political parties across the spectrum.
Amongst all this there were still large parts of Austrian society who felt that Austria was still not conservative or right-wing enough and the FPO filled that void. Started up as a middle of the road alternative to the established parties the FPO soon became a magnet for the far-right. Especially in the very conservative province of Corinthia the FPO gained the most support. Corinthia had been the breeding ground for extreme nationalist and catholic views for decades and when the Nazis took power there were large swathes of Corinthians who voluntarily joined the SS and thus formed the backbone of commanders of the death camps across the Reich.
The FPO had to deal with its third place position in Austrian politics for decades until Jorg Haider became its posterboy for a new Austria. Coming up through the ranks of the FPO in Corinthia this son of an unrepentant NSDAP member, SA volunteer and East-Front veteran and BDM (Nazi Union of German Girls) mother did not mince words.
According to Haider Austria had been too weak after the Allied occupation and had given in to all sorts of unreasonable demands by NATO and the EU. The Army was weak, there were too many immigrants, the Globalists (read: Jews) were running the economy into the ground and the police had been de-clawed. Haider spoke directly to the feelings of victimhood still felt across large parts of Austrian society, especially in the generations that had lived through the war and the generation right after that had dealt with the Allied and Soviet occupation and who were tired of being called just as guilty for warcrimes as the Germans had been.
During Haider’s stint in government memberships of the extreme-right wing student groups called Burschenschaften and neonazi organizations grew exponentially. The police had their hands full arresting dozens of armed young men who were planning terrorist attacks on foreigners or leftist organizations.
Across Europe established political parties reacted with shock to Haider’s leadership of Austria and through the EU parliament Austria was punished with sanctions in a bid to give off a signal to other countries to not go in the same anti-EU direction as Austria. Haider’s leadership also gave a boost to other European right-wing parties as they saw Haider as a beautiful example of how the extreme-right could be made salon-fahig enough to actually gain government control. In Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy right-wing parties started to clean up their ranks from hardcore neonazi types and were rebranding themselves to be more palpable.
The EU sanctions and other international pressure from countries like Israel and Canada made it hard for Haider to stay in power. His decision to be friends with “anti-globalists” like Saddam Hussein and Muamar Ghadaffi, including meeting them and taking their money, did not sit well with FPO voters and soon Haider had to step down from FPO leadership. He tried to restart his career by establishing a new political party called the BZO (Party for the Future of Austria) but the only thing he managed was to split the FPO membership between the two parties and thus tanked them both in coming election cycles.
After his death the revelations of his alleged homosexual activities with other party members became a burden to the FPO. The conservative and extreme-right community in Austria was now without leadership and structure until Kickl decided to step in and take leadership of the FPO in 2021.
Kickl’s anti-EU, anti-immigration, pro-Russian, anti-vax and anti-Islam standpoints were reminiscent of Haider’s views but this time around Austria seemed to be even more susceptible to these ideas. With a pandemic raging across the globe, inflation going up and the war between Russia and Ukraine making Europeans nervous for the future, Kickl’s message fell on grateful ears.
And with Kickl addressing the base fears of the Austrian public he found it easy to raise long buried issues like trying to make the Waffen SS seem like just another part of the German Wehrmacht, and therefore any Austrian member of the SS was not a warcriminal. This felt good for the older generations who had grown up in the myth of victimhood and had felt very uneasy with the last decades of an Austria that had openly dealt with its Nazi past in public, on TV and in schools. Kickl was making it easy to be proud to be an Austrian again.
What also helped Kickl gain power was that Austrian right-wing youths had grown up in a schoolsystem that had, in contrast to their previous generations, dealt with Austria’s Nazi past without shame. They had learned in school how much Austria was complicit in the Nazi warcrime machine and it did not sit well with conservative youths who’s grandparents were being pulled through the mud by the “leftists” and “globalists”. The Identitaren (National Identity youth movement) became a group that not only attracted classic neonazis but also radical catholics, ultra conservatives, anti-feminists and other right-wing believers. The group grew exponentially and several other chapters popped up across Europe.
They became so strong that they thought they could pose an actual threat to the Austrian government and they started to acquire weapons and make plans to overthrow the government. This led to the government banning the group and arresting its leadership. This did not however stop the growth of the far-right youth movement in Austria as they simply changed names or took up causes that kept them close to their original issues like joining the anti-vax movement. Meanwhile, the Identitaren leadership show up at German neonazi rallies and AfD conferences where they are met with applause and excitement.
Austrian society is dealing with a polarization that is all too familiar in the rest of Europe and North-America, but it seems that due to its muddled past there is a very fertile ground for the extreme-right to stay relevant and in power the coming years.