Auf Wiedersehen Joerg Haider

So Auf Wiedersehen to Joerg Haider the leader of the Austrian “Freedom Party” (sic) who died in a car crash on 11th October 2008.

To his supporters Joerg Haider was a patriot who dared to speak uncomfortable truths. His critics saw him as an ambitious, racist opportunist who used anti-immigrant and pro-Nazi rhetoric to stir up populist sentiment. What is doubtless is that Haider - whose death in a car crash at the age of 58 leaves a widow and two daughters - had charisma, but there again so had Adolph Hitler.

Joerg Haider was born in the Upper Austrian town of Bad Goisern in 1950 and his parents were very early members of the Nazi party, who moved to Germany where they became party officials. After the war, they were punished for their affiliations and forced to take up menial work.



But of course Austria is not any country but is the birthplace of Adolph Hitler whom they cheered to the rafters when the Nazis “united” Austria with Germany in 1938. Following the 1938 Anschluss, they would surprise Berlin with their astonishing dedication to National Socialism. During World War II, though they only constituted eight percent of the Third Reich’s population, Austrians comprised fourteen percent of the SS and forty percent of Nazi personnel involved in genocide.

After the war, under Soviet and American occupation Austria portrayed itself dishonestly as “Hitler’s First Victim”. They suggested their country had been occupied by aggressive, arrogant, pompous, warlike, super-efficient Germans from Germany. How else were they to deal with the occupiers? But this would make it difficult to understand why, some sixty years after the war, at least one out of every four Austrians (that is, those who voted for Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party) believes that Hitler wasn’t all that bad, the SS was just your usual elite military formation, and National Socialism could have developed highly-successful economic and employment policies if it had not been mismanaged.


The victims?


The occupiers?

That the Anschluss began with maniacal attacks on Jews by Viennese mobs is common knowledge everywhere except Austria. On March 11, 1938, when Vienna prepared to receive Hitler thousands of Viennese took to the streets of their city like mad persons, dragging anyone who "looked Jewish" from vehicles, clubbing and beating victims, desecrating synagogues, robbing department stores, and raiding Jewish apartments. They compelled rabbis to scrub toilet bowls with prayer shawls and stole whatever cash, jewellery, and furs they could find. An SS correspondent would later write admiringly, "’The Viennese have managed to do overnight what we have failed to achieve in the slow-moving, ponderous north up to this day. In Austria, a boycott of the Jews does not need organizing the people themselves have initiated it’"

This horror was a prelude to what would occur in Vienna and in Austria’s provincial cities during the Krystallnacht. Statistics for November 9 -10, a nightmare period not easily matched in previous European history, include 267 synagogues destroyed, 7,500 businesses and homes devastated, 91 Jews murdered, and 26,000 Jews rounded up. True, "Outside [Vienna] so little Jewish property remained to pillage or expropriate that the pogrom was limited by the success of previous purges". No matter, "local Nazis raped and plundered, tortured and maimed, and in Innsbruck beat or stabbed to death four distinguished Jews".




Kristallnacht, Vienna - What the jolly Viennese did in between waltzing and playing violins

Today walking around the former Jewish Quarter of Leopoldville in Vienna today there neither is a feeling of atonement for the fate of its former inhabitants nor has there been much inclination to restore robbed Jewish owned art to the families of its former owners. Austria remains a country in serious denial.

After school, where he was regularly top of the class, Haider studied law in Vienna and joined the Freedom Party in 1976. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming the party's leader 10 years later. Around the same time he became party leader, Haider inherited a controversial $16m estate in the southern province of Carinthia where he became governor in 1989. Barental, or Bear Valley, was bought during World War II by his great uncle from an Italian Jew who fled in 1940. Critics say the sale was illegitimately forced upon the Jewish owner by the Nazis, but Haider consistently denied this. He amassed a formidable power base in Carinthia, but his first stint as governor in 1989 ended abruptly when he praised the employment policies of Nazi Germany and was forced to resign.

A few years later, he described World War II concentration camps as "punishment camps" and said the Nazi SS was "a part of the German army which should be honoured". He has also compared the deportation of Jews by the Nazis to the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the war.


Happy Germanic People - Austria after the Anschluss


However we must not tar all or indeed most Austrians with the neo-fascist brush. To their great credit when Haider’s Freedom Party entered the Austrian government, thousands of Austrians and others who joined them from all over Europe marched in protest, in Vienna. Israel recalled its ambassador, and European nations made very clear their displeasure no matter what rationales Austria’s government offered. Given the costs of what had happened in Europe during World War II - thanks to Austrian as well as German fascism - it became more difficult to sell snake oil in today than in 1938.

Joerg Haider was driving at twice the speed limit when he died in a crash early on Saturday 11th October 2008, court officials have said. Mr Haider, 58, was travelling alone at 142km/h (88mph) in a 70km/h zone when his Volkswagen Phaeton V6 crashed. The accident occurred south of Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, where he was the provincial governor. He was leader of the Alliance for Austria's Future, and was known for his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.



Mr Haider had crashed shortly after leaving a nightclub. However, prosecutor Gottfried Kranza would not say whether Mr Haider's body had tested positive for alcohol. Mr Haider had reportedly been due to attend his mother's 90th birthday celebrations later in the day.

But the great irony of Joerg Haider’s death is that, in years to come, he will not be remembered for the stupidity of his beliefs and policies but for the stupidity of the way he died. For he was travelling at twice the speed limit in one of the world’s most stupid cars, a Volkswagen Phaeton V6. What a way to be remembered. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a Mercedes but in a Volkswagen. At least it was made by the company named after Hitler’s “People’s Car” so I’m sure in their Lebensraum in the sky his ex- Stormtrooper father and Hitler Youth organiser mother will take some comfort from the manner of his passing.

Auf Wiedersehen Joerg Haider.


Volkswagen Phaeton V6


Note; Historical references to the Anschluss and its aftermath are from Evan Burr Bukey. Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945_. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.