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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/print...9295360,00.html
Austria in row over Nazi
From correspondents in Vienna
16apr04
THE far-right Freedom Party of controversial Austrian politician Joerg Haider was embroiled in a new row today as it closed ranks around one of its members who used Nazi terminology to slam immigration.
Vice-chancellor Hubert Gorbach, a member of the party, defended its youth president, Johann Gudenus, who said Vienna risked "Umvolkung" - a Nazi term meaning a change in racial composition - because of the number of naturalised f
reigners in the capital.
Gudenus recently told a party conference: "Measures must be taken immediately to stop the Umvolkung which still raised smiles in the early 1990s but which is in full swing n
ow.
quot;
"One could question the vocabulary used, but one has to su
pport the content of what he (Gudenus) said," contended Gorbach, who is also transport minister.
The term Umvolkung was coined by SS chief Heinrich Himmler who used it both to describe Germany's ambitions to Germanise the people of eastern Europe and to warn against inter-marriage between Germans and J*ws.
Gudenus, a member of an aristocratic Austrian family, has also been backed by the party's leader in Vienna, Heinz-Christian Strache.
Strache saluted him for "having the courage to condemn a scandalous policy that will make Austrians strangers in their own land".
Almost 40,000 foreigners were naturalised in Austria in 2003, half of them in Vienna.
Austria's opposi
tion Greens and Social-Democrats (SPOe) today called on Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel to take up the matter with the Freedom Party (FPOe), which has since 2000 been part of the country's rul
ing
coal
ition.
<
br>"If Austria's vice-chancellor defends Nazi vocabulary, we can no longer work with him," Green party lead
er Alexander Van der Bellen said.
"We call on the chancellor to distance himself from this terminology and to clear up the matter," he added.
The Greens and Social-Democrats, which last month formed a controversial cooperation pact with Haider at local government level, described Gorbach's statement as "scandalous".
Schuessel has not made any comment, but his secretary general Reinhold Lopatka, pointed out the offending language was not used by members of the chancellor's conservative People's Party.
The FPOe, which Haider led from 1986 to 2000, has shocked Europe with its xenophobic policies.
Haider himself spa
rked outrage in 1991 by praising the employment policies of the Third Reich.
He did so again in 1995 when he said Nazi concentration camps were no more than "disciplinary
camps&q
uot; and
in March, while su
ccessfully campaigning for re-election as governor of Austria's Carinthia province, told voters only hard-working foreigners were welcome in the country.
Aust
ria has eight million people of whom 800,000 are foreigners.
Haider's former adviser on culture, Andreas Moelzer, in the 1990s became the first politician to openly use the term "Umvolkung" since World War II.
Moelzer is today the editor of the FPOe mouthpiece Zur Zeit and a commentator for the country's biggest newspaper, the tabloid Kronenzeitung.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/print...9295360,00.html
Austria in row over Nazi
From correspondents in Vienna
16apr04
THE far-right Freedom Party of controversial Austrian politician Joerg Haider was embroiled in a new row today as it closed ranks around one of its members who used Nazi terminology to slam immigration.
Vice-chancellor Hubert Gorbach, a member of the party, defended its youth president, Johann Gudenus, who said Vienna risked "Umvolkung" - a Nazi term meaning a change in racial composition - because of the number of naturalised f
reigners in the capital.
Gudenus recently told a party conference: "Measures must be taken immediately to stop the Umvolkung which still raised smiles in the early 1990s but which is in full swing n
ow.
quot;
"One could question the vocabulary used, but one has to su
pport the content of what he (Gudenus) said," contended Gorbach, who is also transport minister.
The term Umvolkung was coined by SS chief Heinrich Himmler who used it both to describe Germany's ambitions to Germanise the people of eastern Europe and to warn against inter-marriage between Germans and J*ws.
Gudenus, a member of an aristocratic Austrian family, has also been backed by the party's leader in Vienna, Heinz-Christian Strache.
Strache saluted him for "having the courage to condemn a scandalous policy that will make Austrians strangers in their own land".
Almost 40,000 foreigners were naturalised in Austria in 2003, half of them in Vienna.
Austria's opposi
tion Greens and Social-Democrats (SPOe) today called on Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel to take up the matter with the Freedom Party (FPOe), which has since 2000 been part of the country's rul
ing
coal
ition.
<
br>"If Austria's vice-chancellor defends Nazi vocabulary, we can no longer work with him," Green party lead
er Alexander Van der Bellen said.
"We call on the chancellor to distance himself from this terminology and to clear up the matter," he added.
The Greens and Social-Democrats, which last month formed a controversial cooperation pact with Haider at local government level, described Gorbach's statement as "scandalous".
Schuessel has not made any comment, but his secretary general Reinhold Lopatka, pointed out the offending language was not used by members of the chancellor's conservative People's Party.
The FPOe, which Haider led from 1986 to 2000, has shocked Europe with its xenophobic policies.
Haider himself spa
rked outrage in 1991 by praising the employment policies of the Third Reich.
He did so again in 1995 when he said Nazi concentration camps were no more than "disciplinary
camps&q
uot; and
in March, while su
ccessfully campaigning for re-election as governor of Austria's Carinthia province, told voters only hard-working foreigners were welcome in the country.
Aust
ria has eight million people of whom 800,000 are foreigners.
Haider's former adviser on culture, Andreas Moelzer, in the 1990s became the first politician to openly use the term "Umvolkung" since World War II.
Moelzer is today the editor of the FPOe mouthpiece Zur Zeit and a commentator for the country's biggest newspaper, the tabloid Kronenzeitung.