![]() In total, he was charged five times for breaking a law called the Verbotsgesetz, enacted in 1947 to halt the spread of fascist ideology. The interview with Schweiger took place a few weeks before he was due to appear in court charged with promoting neo-Nazi ideology. Wiesanthal helped capture Nazi war criminals such as Franz Stangl, Hermine Braunsteiner and Adolf Eichmann. SWC was established in 1977 and named after Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor from Austria who dedicated his life to bringing Nazis to justice following the end of World War Two. The Austrians claimed that was ‘passive complicity in genocide’, a category they invented, I would say, to limit the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.” ![]() He said: “She’d been investigated and had admitted taking people to be gassed. The other case was Erna Wallisch, Dr Zuroff added, who served at Majdanek death camp in Poland. “So, of course, he should have been immediately deported or extradited but it never happened and there were doctors claiming he suffered from dementia.” Then, all of sudden, the day after I gave an interview saying Austria was a paradise for Nazi war criminals, they suddenly said he wasn’t an Austrian citizen. He said: “At the beginning, the Austrians claimed that he was Austrian and could not be extradited, when Croatia tried to extradite him. The failure, of course, was partly Austria’s and partly Germany’s but the Austrians could have been done more.”ĭr Zuroff cited another two cases he dealt with personally that never made trial – one was a Croatian police chief called Milivoj Asner, who sent hundreds of people to be murdered (most went to the notorious Ustasha camp at Jasenovac, not far from Pozega) and who later went to Austria. He died in Syria, unrepentant and unprosecuted.”Īnother was Aribert Heim, an Austrian doctor at Mauthausen concentration camp who became known as Doctor Death, Dr Zuroff added, who disappeared just as he was about to stand trial in Germany. Alois Brunner, for example, who was an Austrian responsible for transporting 128,500 Jews to death camps. He said: “There were several high profile cases who were never brought to justice. He said Schweiger’s battalion had committed “many war crimes” and that a failure to investigate his past was “hardly surprising given Austria’s almost total failure to prosecute Nazi war criminals, and political sympathisers.”ĭr Zuroff went further and cited several past SWC investigations into Nazi war crimes, stating that Austria had often been uncooperative. Such memorabilia is banned in AustriaĪfter reading a transcript of the Schweiger interview, Dr Ephraim Zuroff, SWC’s director, was critical of Austria for not preventing a former SS officer from becoming such an influential figure in Austrian politics. ![]() Schweiger said that after the NDP was banned in 1988 for promoting neo-Nazi ideology, he often travelled to Germany to give lectures.Īt his home, there were mementos from his past including a pennant from the SS Death’s Head unit that ran Hitler’s concentration camps. He was a founding member of three far right political parties in Austria – the Association of Independents (VdU) founded in 1949, the National Democratic Party (NDP), and the Freedom Party (FPO), currently Austria’s third largest party which for years has been tainted by allegations of links to neo-Nazis. Schweiger was an Austrian Nazi who became a lieutenant in the Waffen SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, an elite unit formed in the 1930s to act as the Führer’s personal bodyguards.Īfter escaping a POW camp during WWII, he returned to his homeland where he lived openly from 1947 and became heavily involved in politics. The information provides an insight into the rise of the extreme far right in Austria following the end of World War Two and the role of a man who is still revered by Europe’s neo-Nazis.Ĭopies were sent to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC) in Jerusalem, Israel, an organisation that investigates Nazi war crimes. ![]()
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