On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, Johannes Schneider wrote:
> I forwarded this appeal to another list and was challenged there, to
> produce any 'Holocaust denial' quotes from Haider. So if anyone can
> help out...
I'm almost sure he never has. I also think he hasn't said anything directly anti-Semitic. What makes me think this is that the list of his "Entgleisungen" (slips) have become almost canonic at this point, and has been repeated and double checked by established media all over the world. If there had been a holocaust denial that held up, I'm sure it would have been passed on. I think Haider is smarter than that, and more interesting, in a horrible car crash kind of way.
The list of his top offenses, as far as I can determine, are:
He referred to Konzentrationlager as Strafflager; said the Waffen SS was part of the army and deserved the same military honors; and said that Hitler's employment policies were "orderly" (causing a flap that forced him to resign from the Governorship of Carinthia, to which he simply got reelected). He also leads a party that was founded as a haven for ex-Nazis. Most of them have of course died off by now, and the remainder are too old to serve in office, but it's still home to some flaming racists, like this guy Prinzhorn, who got turned down for the cabinet post because he plastered Austria with racist posters during the campaign. Haider has also marched in parades that had ex-Nazis in them; his dad was a flaming Nazi; and he inherited a 38,000 acre estate bought from fleeing Jews at presumably a fire-sale price. He has made the usual European rightwing racist cracks about Poles being "car thieves" and Yugoslavs being "burglary experts" and Russians being "experts in blackmail and mugging." And lastly his rhetoric and language policies about the Slovenians, who are historically the key minority in Carthinthia, are pretty harsh.
But no one's mentioned any statement where he denied the holocaust, and from the extensiveness of that list, I kind of feel people would have seized on it by now. And of course Haider's made a lot of gestures in the opposite direction since the October elections. He visted Holocaust museum when he was in the US for the New York Marathon. His party is represented in the European parliament by Peter Sichrovsky, who is a Jew, and he brought him to his press conferences in New York to show him off. He read that speech that Schuessel wrote for him at the swearing in. And lastly, Simon Weisenthal who, 92 years old, still lives in Vienna, was quoted as saying that Haider wasn't a threat to democracy. I'm pretty sure that if Haider had denied the holocaust, Simon would have heard about it and mentioned it.
So my guess is that he's a son of a bitch, but probably not a denier.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com