Far-right criticised over Nazi songbook
VIENNA: The far-right candidate in an Austrian state election was under pressure on Tuesday after a magazine report about song lyrics celebrating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.
According to the Falter weekly, Udo Landbauer of the Freedom Party (FPOe), which is in the national governing coalition, is deputy chair of a student fraternity behind a songbook containing the texts.
According to the left-leaning weekly, the lyrics of one song reads: “In their midst comes the Jew Ben Gurion: ‘Step on the gas, old Germanics, we can make it to seven million’.”
Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust during World War II, many of them in gas chambers in Nazi death camps. David BenGurion was the first prime minister of Israel.
Other songs pay tribute to the Condor Legion, the Nazi unit responsible for the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, as well as paratroopers behind atrocities in Crete in World War II, Falter added.
The allegations came ahead of an election in Lower Austria on Sunday. Opinion polls predict strong gains for the FPOe, putting them in third place — as in national elections last October — on between 16 and 21%.
An FPOe spokesman told the Austria Press Agency that Mr Landbauer, 31, “has nothing to do” with the song texts, and that the fraternity was preparing a new songbook without the texts concerning “this disastrous time”.
If, as Falter suggests, the book was re-printed in 1997, then Mr Landbauer was 11 years old at the time and “not even allowed to ride a bike on his own,” the spokesman told APA.
But Bernhard Ebner, the head of the centre-right People’s Party (OeVP) in Lower Austria, said the allegations were “unbelievably serious” and that they needed to be “completely cleared up”.
The centre-left Social Democrats (SPOe) said Mr Landbauer should resign immediately, a call echoed by the liberal NEOS party if the claims turned out to be accurate.
Sunday’s election is the first since the FPOe became junior coalition partners to the OeVP in December under Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, obtaining the interior, foreign and defence ministries.
Despite its leadership saying it rejects all extremism and its leader Heinz-Christian Strache visiting Israel, Austria’s main Jewish organisation the IKG earlier this month said it refused to meet FPOe ministers.
The IKG said on Tuesday that it would boycott a commemorative event today in Austria’s temporary parliament ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance on Saturday.
The party was formed by former Nazis in the 1950s and Mr Strache, 48, now vice-chancellor, dallied with neo-Nazism in his youth although he now says this was when he was “stupid, young and naive”.
Mr Kurz of the OeVP, who has rejected criticism of his coalition with the FPOe by saying the party should be judged on its actions not its past, on Tuesday took to Twitter to call the song texts “racist, anti-Semitic and absolutely sickening”.
“There needs to be fully cleared up and those responsible brought to account,” Mr Kurz wrote.
Mr Landbauer, whose mother is Iranian, in November called his OeVP rival in the election, former interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner, “Muslim-mummy-Mikl” because of her support for “multicultural madness”.