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Austrian teens visit Auschwitz - then vote for Joerg Haider!
By Michal Levertov, Haaretz Correspondent
Oct. 12, 2008

Tags: Auschwitz, Israel news

An activist in an Austrian organization commemorating the Holocaust, who traveled last month with a group of 16-year-olds from his country to visit the Auschwitz Na.zi death camp in Poland, found to his horror that the youngsters were planning to vote for the extreme right wing political parties in the Austrian elections.

The activist, in his twenties, said that despite their far-right leaning, the teens expressed a genuine interest in learning about the Holocaust, and approached the tour with the appropriate seriousness.

The election, in which far-right parties doubled their representation at the end of last month, was the first election in which the young students were eligible to vote. The activist said he overheard the students saying they were planning to vote for Heinz-Christian Strache's Freedom Party or Joerg Haider's Alliance for the Future of Austria - "because of the foreigners."

It was in fact those who were most interested in learning about the Holocaust were the ones who led this trend, said the activist. In response, the group's counselors tried to stress in their discussions the relationship between the lessons of the past and judgments on the present - but were unsuccessful. "The youngsters were unable to make the connection," the activist reported with regret.

Though the unprecedented success of the far-right in the recent election has many Austrians worried, it did not come as a surprise. It is a product of the larger parties' failure to maintain a stable government, a growing hatred for foreigners in the face of immigration from Eastern Europe, and a long-standing legacy in Austria of denying responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.

Massive efforts, some more genuine than others, to reverse this legacy have been undertaken in Austria over the last ten years, with some positive, but insufficient, results. For example, the question of the ownership of artwork displayed in a large exhibition at Vienna's Leopold Museum sparked an impassioned national debate. Austrian Culture Minister Claudia Schmied announced that legislation over the last decade regarding the return of artwork looted by Na.zis to its rightful owners was not adequate, and allows museum patrons to circumvent the requirement to return the works. Her call to expand the legislation was met with strong opposition and with heated public and political discussions.

On the other hand, projects directly examining Austria's civilian responsibility for the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust have been flourishing recently. A large portion of these projects has been initiated locally by ordinary citizens, academic bodies, artists and NGOs. Thus, when residents of Vienna's Servitengasse Street began inquiring about the fate of the Jews that inhabited their homes before the Holocaust, the project turned into a large-scale research venture which included the name of every street resident and the contacting of their remaining relatives around the world. The project's findings were recorded in a book, a documentary film and an impressive memorial erected on the busy street.

Austria's denial of its role in the Holocaust can be attributed to an exonerating document that the allies signed in November 1943. The Moscow Declaration, signed by the foreign secretaries of the Governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, maintained that Austria was the first free nation to be victimized by the Hitlerean aggression. However, though Austria comprised 11-12 percent of the population of the Third Reich, Austrians made up 30 percent of the Na.zi killing machine.

The activist who let the group of students on a tour of Auschwitz summed up the experience, saying that the stance of Austria's far-right political movements does not only stem from an unwillingness to confront the past, but primarily from an inability to analyze the past in reference to the present. "The problem in Austria," he said, "is that though the education system teaches history, it has abandoned altogether the aspect of civics. In its absence, the students simply fail to comprehend the foundations of democracy and the direct link between preserving those foundations and the prevention of repeating historical tragedies."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1026911.html