R
Arnold history claim mocked AP 2004-09-04 04:18:07
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/News/2004/09/04/615445.html
VIENNA -- Austrian historians challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican national convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and left a "Socialist" country when he moved away in 1968. Recalling that the Soviets once occupied part of Austria in the aftermath of Second World War, the California governor told the convention on Tuesday: "I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes."
No way, say historians, challenging Schwarzenegger's knowledge of postwar history, if not his enduring popularity among Austrians.
"It's a fact -- as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria," the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighbouring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone.
At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.
"When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets," Schwarzenegger told the Republican convention.
The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.
"Let me tell you this: As a boy, I lived for many years across the street from where the Russians were based in Vienna, and honestly, I never saw a Russian tank there," retiree Franz Nitsch said yesterday. "He said it all on purpose -- and that's bad."
In his convention address, Schwarzenegger also said: "As a kid, I saw the Socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left" in 1955 and Austria regained its independence.
But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice rector of Graz University, said Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People's party and the Social Democratic party. Between 1945 and 1970, all Austria's chancellors were conservatives, not Socialists.
Also, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative government headed by People's party chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic.