The head of Vienna's Jewish community has attacked a Graz court's decision not to prosecute a right-wing magazine which claimed Mauthausen concentration camp survivors were themselves criminals.

Oskar Deutsch said the failure to put Aula magazine writer Manfred Duswald and publisher Martin Pfeiffer on trial was a "heinous perpetrator-victim role reversal".

Charges had been filed by Green Party politician Harald Walser, who has demanded an explanation for the decision not to prosecute.

It is illegal under Austrian law to belittle Nazi crimes during the Holocaust.

The article appeared last year in the magazine, which is close to Austria's right-wing Freedom Party.

Under the headline Mass Murderers Liberated from Mauthausen, Mr Duswald declared: "The fact that a significant number of liberated prisoners from Mauthausen wreaked havoc on the population is considered proven by the courts and only concentration camp fetishists contest this today."

He also claimed freed survivors had "plagued the country… robbing and plundering, murdering and raping".

Mr Deutsch accused the court of approving Nazi ideology by accepting that camp prisoners were "criminals".

"The state prosecutors thereby are whitewashing Nazi logic, and that's extremely dangerous," he said.

In a letter to Mr Duswald, one prosecutor wrote that "it is understandable that the release of several thousand people from the Mauthausen concentration camp posed a nuisance" to people in the surrounding area.

Though most of the inmates were Jewish, there were also violent criminals among those imprisoned there, the prosecutor said.

"So it can't be ruled out" that crimes occurred, he added.

Austrian media claimed Mr Duswald was linked to a right-wing extremist fraternity. His article was a review of a book whose author has accused him of twisting the facts.