Austria’s oldest Holocaust survivor, 103-year-old Marko Feingold, survived four Nazi concentration camps and has spent his post-war life bearing witness to Europe’s fascist past.
Now Feingold is less worried about Austria’s past than its immediate future if voters on Sunday elect post-war Europe’s first far-right, populist head of state.
Final polls give Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party (FPö) a narrow lead on his centrist rival, ex-Green Party leader Alexander Van der Bellen.
Alarmed, Feingold and other Holocaust survivors have made a last-minute intervention, warning that Austria’s embrace of right-wing populism may be the thin end of a dangerous wedge.
Arrested in Prague in 1939, Feingold survived Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Neuengamme, near Hamburg. Born in 1913, he was raised in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt, the city’s old Jewish neighbourhood. Thus a recent FPö campaign to “make Leopoldstadt Austrian again” carried uncomfortable echoes of the past.
"Austria is a democracy with Nazi character," Feingold told The Irish Times. "It came to terms with its Nazi past very late and even then not on its own initiative."
Victim mentality
Postwar Austria’s self-perception as Hitler’s “first victim” only began to crack in the 1980s, he suggests, when revelations about UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim’s Wehrmacht past undermined his ambitions to become Austrian president.
Another factor in today’s political landscape, Feingold argues, is that most Austrian Nazis received only mild punishment – if any – for their crimes and were left with the feeling “they did nothing wrong”.
One of those ex-Nazis was Anton Reinthaller, an SS officer and minister in Third Reich Austria. A decade after the war ended, he became the FPö’s first leader.
Four years ago, today’s FPö leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, posted on his Facebook feed a hook-nosed Jewish banker caricature. However, presidential hopeful Norbert Hofer insists neither his party nor its leaders are anti-Semitic.
To highlight this, the FPö held an event last month warning of a new anti-Semitic threat from the 90,000 largely Muslim asylum seekers Austria accepted last year.
Muslim ‘invaders’
FPö officials deny that refugees and Muslims have replaced Jews as their scapegoat of choice. This after a presidential campaign in which Hofer warned of Muslim “invaders” and refugees as “terrorists” and potential rapists.
“Austria cannot be a country where women are afraid to be alone on the street,” said Hofer. “Politics needs to make sure that rapists, women abusers and criminal asylum seekers are not just released on remand.”
Earlier this week over three million shared a video of a Viennese Holocaust survivor identified only as “Gertrude”, who said Hofer’s anti-Muslim rhetoric reminded her of the 1930s.
“The thing that bothers me the most is the denigration of others, the attempt to bring out people’s most base feelings instead of their decency,” said the 89-year-old in the video. “I have seen this once before . . . and it hurts and scares me”.
It’s not just Holocaust survivors who are worried. Ilja Sichrovsky (34), the founder of Austria’s Muslim Jewish Conference, agrees with Marko Feingold’s link between the FPö’s success today and Austria’s unresolved Nazi past. The populist party has spent decades “blurring the red line” of what is acceptable to say in domestic political debate, he says, while Austria’s two mainstream parties have “administered rather than governed” in the last 30 years. As for the political left, it has always “preferred to take the moral high ground” rather than challenge the FPö politically.
“Simple answers to complex problems are what work at the moment,” said Sichrovsky.
“Or, as the FPö promises, to go back to a Europe where everything that is different sparks fear and eventually hate.”
