Analysis
Freedom Party’s inept report shows how Austria’s far right has not changed
Despite attempts to legitimise itself with support from Israeli academics, the far-right party remains stuck in its ways
February 12, 2020 17:01
2 min read
Despite attempts to legitimise itself with support from Israeli academics, the far-right party remains stuck in its ways
February 12, 2020 17:01During the fallout from a political scandal involving a politician, his Greater German nationalist fraternity, and a racist, antisemitic songbook, Heinz-Christian Strache decided the time had come for Austria’s biggest far-right party to investigate itself.
In February 2018, the then-leader of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) announced a historical commission tasked with examining the history of German nationalism in Austria and those ex-Nazis who founded the party after the Second World War.
Other political parties had already done something similar. In 2005, the Social Democratic Party published its own report investigating its links to Nazism, while the People’s Party (ÖVP) released the findings of its historical commission in 2018.
The FPÖ commission’s working group was quickly established and an autumn 2018 deadline set for the publication of its findings.
That deadline came and went. In May 2019, the FPÖ’s coalition with the ÖVP was dissolved and elections called for September. During campaigning in August, the party snuck out an abbreviated version of the commission’s report.
It was not until December 22, two days prior to the Christmas break, that it finally released the full version.
The question was whether the FPÖ could honestly investigate itself. Now, three leading Austrian historians have examined the report and have definitively answered: no.
At a February 3 press conference, the University of Vienna’s Oliver Rathkolb, University of Salzburg’s Margit Reiter, and Gerhard Baumgartner from the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance declared the FPÖ’s historical commission to be a “phantom commission”.
Stacked with unqualified party functionaries, the commission held no sittings and came to no shared conclusions.
Its 700-page report is the sum of uncoordinated individual contributions and contains at most 100 pages relevant to the commission’s stated goals: to examine German nationalism in Austria and the links between ex-Nazis and the FPÖ.
It reproduces falsehoods about FPÖ founders like SS-Brigadeführer Anton Reinthaller, minimising his links to the Nazi system, the historians argue.
The report is also guilty of historical relativism, with the right-wing historian Lothar Höbelt arguing the FPÖ’s Nazi members constitute “brown flecks” in the way German chancellor Angela Merkel — who was raised in the former East Germany — represents a communist influence in the CDU.
Key themes including the party’s relationship with right-wing, extremist and neo-Nazi groups and individuals during the postwar period were entirely ignored. For these historians, the FPÖ historical commission’s report is not worth the paper on which it is written.
Considering these flaws, perhaps the most curious aspect of the whole affair is that the FPÖ was able to find two Israeli historians—Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Raphael Israeli—to sign off on it.
The full version reveals that in his contribution, Prof Israeli found the FPÖ “rejected all forms of violence, totalitarianism and racism, and seeks to ensure peace, self-determination and freedom, bound by the belief that all humans are born free and are equal in dignity and rights.”
Dr Kedar wrote of his hope that “the Austrian Jewish community, the Jewish people in general and Israel in particular, will view the FPÖ as a friend and ally vis-à-vis the challenges which we all face.”
Their contributions resemble political tracts more than works of historical analysis.
Moshe Zimmermann, former director of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Center for German History, told Der Standard that Dr Kedar is not an expert in Nazi history and politically “so far to the right” that he would find “common cause” with the FPÖ.
In 2018, the Freedom Party set to investigate itself but, as Prof Rathkolb concluded, the report did not live up to the goals it set itself.
The party has, once more, failed to change its ways.
