Historians' commission of the FPÖ

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Presentation of the historian's report on December 23, 2019

The so-called historians commission of the FPÖ was a committee of scientists set up in 2018 by the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) to deal with the history of the party. In August 2019, a “summary of the rough report” was presented. The publication of the final report of the Commission of Historians, which has been postponed several times, took place on December 23, 2019. The anthology was sharply criticized by contemporary historians.

history

The establishment of a historians commission of the FPÖ was decided at a federal party conference on February 12, 2018. The committee was set up to deal with the history of the “third camp” and to shed light on “dark spots” in its party history. Specifically, the closeness of the party to racist or anti-Semitic ideas should be examined by historians. The reason for this decision was the scandal about anti-Semitic texts in a songbook of the fraternity Germania zu Wiener Neustadt , to which the Lower Austrian FPÖ politician Udo Landbauer belonged. The Commission should, among other things, take up such allegations and carry out a scientifically sound review.

A first interim report from the Commission was originally supposed to be available by October 2018, which was supposedly completed in December 2018. The publication of the report was postponed several times from the originally planned autumn 2018 and was most recently scheduled to take place in early August 2019. On August 5, 2019, a 32-page summary of the "over 1,000" planned pages was published. Commission leader Wilhelm Brauneder said at the presentation that overall he came to the conclusion that “the FPÖ is a party like almost any other”. The summary was heavily criticized at home and abroad.

On December 23, 2019, the final report was published at a press conference announced the day before. Nineteen authors were involved in the 668-page report, including 12 historians. It is available for download on the FPÖ website.

tasks

The Commission of Historians was tasked with shedding light on the past of the Freedom Party and, in particular, examining possible personal and ideological overlaps, points of contact and contacts with the extreme right . Only the FPÖ was explicitly defined as the subject of investigation, German-national connections or a broader “third camp” were excluded from it. As a reason for this, the party cited that fraternities were private associations that could not be forced to disclose their archives. The head of the coordination group, Andreas Mölzer, described the commission in the Carinthian month in April 2018 as a "tactical maneuver to get out of the headlines", which caused displeasure with the official task. The party leadership rejected Mölzer's statement, however.

In spring 2019, Brauneder announced that it would also include the FPÖ's involvement with the Austrian Identitarian Movement as a topic in the investigation.

Members

The composition of the FPÖ historians' commission was not announced for a long time; previously, only the person of the chairman was presented, it is the lawyer and former Third President of the National Council Wilhelm Brauneder . This should work together with a team of 30 to 50 historians, scientists critical of the third camp should be involved as external parties via hearings. The documentation archive of the Austrian resistance has made its willingness to cooperate on the condition that it is about a serious scientific analysis and not about an attempt to clean it. According to its chairman, the other members of the commission should not be named until autumn 2018, as soon as the commission's first results are available. In fact, the names of the employees on the report were only revealed in August 2019:

Three other employees became known on the day the final report was presented:

Coordination group

In addition to the actual historians' commission, there was also a coordination group (also known as the reference group), consisting of current and former FPÖ functionaries who were supposed to "lead and control" the process of processing. The precise role of this group became known that they should put the Commission in contact with politicians against whom allegations of involvement in right-wing extremism or racist attacks were raised. The FPÖ club chairman Walter Rosenkranz assured, however, that the FPÖ would not exert any political influence on the commission.

The following people belonged to this coordination group:

criticism

Criticism in advance

The criticism after the announcement of the FPÖ historians commission was aimed on the one hand at the involved actors and their relationship to the FPÖ and right-wing extremism. The objectivity of committee and coordination group members who belong to the FPÖ or who have published it in right-wing extremist publications and who are now supposed to research any “dark spots” in their party's past was questioned. 570 contemporary historians signed a resolution in which they called for transparency and independence as a basis for serious processing. The Commission's lack of internationality and technical expertise was also criticized. The apparently intended subsequent examination by the Islam-critical Israeli historian Motti Kedar is unsuitable for allaying these concerns due to his lack of specialist knowledge of National Socialism before and after 1945.

On the other hand, the exclusion of the fraternities from the research framework of the commission led to criticism. This fact was due to the fact that German national corporations such as fraternities overlap with the FPÖ. In 2016, around a third of the Freedom Faction in the Vienna Landtag were members of a fraternity, and there were also several fraternity members in the coordination group of the FPÖ historians' commission. Another reason for criticism was that the latest scandals about members of the FPÖ, such as those about the Lower Austrian FPÖ top candidate Udo Landbauer or the ministry employee Herwig Götschober , are directly linked to their membership in German national fraternities. Critics feared that serious reappraisal without opening the fraternity archives would not make sense.

Brauneder's person as chairman of the commission also met with criticism from historians and civil society organizations such as the Austrian Students' Union or the NGO SOS Mitmensch . Brauneder, for example, advocates the thesis that Austria is a German state, which brought him accusations of German nationalism. In addition, he published texts in the auditorium , which the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance describes as a "long-term defining organ" of "Austrian right-wing extremism after 1945", as well as in the text " Courage ", which the German constitution protection classifies as "right-wing extremist and unconstitutional" .

Criticism of the results

After the presentation of the short summary in August 2019, two employees of the report expressed criticism: In an interview with the Austrian daily newspaper, Kurt Scholz, the former Viennese city school councilor, rejected the allegation that he had been a member of the historians' commission as being shortened. A year and a half ago he made a contribution for Wilhelm Brauneder and there has been no contact since then. He asked the FPÖ to put the entire report online. Michael Wladika criticized that his contribution had been shortened and taken out of context.

After a cursory analysis of the first three contributions, media scientist and plagiarism expert Stefan Weber raised a plagiarism allegation in December 2019 that he had found matches with Wikipedia articles.

The journalist Armin Wolf , who had read the report for an interview with Commission member Andreas Mölzer on December 27 about the Christmas holidays, called the reason that no inquiries had been made to fraternities to evaluate their archives because of the General Data Protection Regulation , absurd . He also described it as particularly grotesque that there wasn't a single paragraph on the Identitarian Movement, but at the same time, Laila Mirzo, an activist of the Identitarians, had written a contribution.

Several contemporary historians took the commission and its report sharply to court. Oliver Rathkolb emphasized that the term “historians' commission” was a fraudulent label, since the group of authors apparently did not hold any plenary sessions. In addition, many of the authors are not historians. A study on the basis of the party board minutes, announced in an interview by the chairman of the commission, Brauneder, did not appear. Archives of the FPÖ were hardly evaluated, those of fraternities not at all. The original work order of the then FPÖ chairman HC Strache had not been fulfilled by the report.

According to Margit Reiter , author of a monograph on the beginnings of the FPÖ, the report lacks information on the role of the founding members of the FPÖ's predecessor party VdU in National Socialism and their attitudes after the end of the war. Current scientific publications have not been taken into account. The "legend" of the "good Nazi" was reproduced via FPÖ founding father Anton Reinthaller . This results in a strongly distorted picture.

For Gerhard Baumgartner , head of the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance , the report is a “rather superficial work” in which important aspects were not dealt with, such as the amalgamation of party members in the South Tyrolean terror . Almost nothing was said about identities and fraternities, nothing about the current networking of prominent FPÖ politicians with right-wing extremist circles. It often seems that the NSDAP is not perceived as a terrorist group, but as a “folk dance group with white stockings”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FPÖ advises today on the "Historians Commission". In: diepresse.com . February 12, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Interim report on "dark spots" by the FPÖ is available. In: diepresse.com . December 12, 2018, accessed December 12, 2018.
  3. ↑ Historians' Commission: Continue to wait for the FPÖ report. In: wienerzeitung.at . July 9, 2019, accessed July 9, 2019 .
  4. ^ FPÖ presents part of historians' report. In: orf.at . August 5, 2019, accessed August 6, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Devastating criticism of the FPÖ historian's report. In: orf.at . August 6, 2019, accessed August 6, 2019 .
  6. ↑ a b Historians' Commission: How the FPÖ looks for brown spots. In: diepresse.com . February 13, 2018, accessed May 2, 2018 .
  7. ↑ a b Lissy Kaufmann: Israeli researcher on FPÖ report: Authors are "not the beacons of the historians' guild". In: derstandard.at . August 12, 2019, accessed September 20, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Presentation on Monday: FPÖ reveals historian's report. In: orf.at . December 22, 2019, accessed December 22, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Markus Sulzbacher, Laurin Lorenz: FPÖ historian's report as a “Christmas present for the opposing public”. In: derstandard.at . December 23, 2019, accessed December 23, 2019 .
  10. ^ FP historians' commission, according to Mölzer, "tactical maneuver". In: diepresse.com . April 27, 2018, accessed December 22, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Identitarians become a topic in the FPÖ historian's commission. In: wienerzeitung.at . April 10, 2019, accessed April 13, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Markus Sulzbacher: FPÖ presents its history - partially. In: derstandard.at . August 6, 2019, accessed August 7, 2019.
  13. ↑ a b From Stenzel to Mölzer: FPÖ presents historical commission. In: diepresse.com . February 13, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Reactions: "Fear of the FPÖ before real reappraisal". In: diepresse.com . February 13, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  15. ↑ "Does not meet scientific standards". In: science.orf.at . April 10, 2018, accessed May 2, 2018 .
  16. ^ Corporated FPÖ politicians. Research Group Ideologies and Policies of Inequality, January 21, 2016, accessed on May 2, 2018 .
  17. ^ FPÖ-NÖ: Udo Landbauer advertised a book with Nazi songs: "You people from the depths". In: profil.at . January 24, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  18. ↑ NS Songbook: Götsch top makes a precaution apology. In: kurier.at . February 22, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Recognize - right-wing extremism - right-wing extremist organizations - the auditorium. In: doew.at . Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Christa Zöchling : In the sense of re-education: The world of Wilhelm Brauneder. In: profil.at . February 15, 2018, accessed May 2, 2018 .
  21. ^ AUSTRIA: Kurt Scholz distances himself from the FPÖ report. In: ots.at . August 6, 2018, accessed December 22, 2019 .
  22. ^ FPÖ historians report: Another co-author keeps his distance. In: orf.at . August 12, 2019, accessed December 22, 2019 .
  23. ^ FPÖ historian's report: “Numerous matches” with Wikipedia. In: diepresse.com . December 24, 2019, accessed December 25, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Armin Wolf: "Points of contact with National Socialism". In: arminwolf.at . January 1, 2020, accessed on January 8, 2020.
  25. ↑ Oliver Rathkolb: Nothing but a blue label fraud. In: falter.at . January 7, 2020, accessed on January 8, 2020.
  26. ^ FPÖ historical report: "Psychogram of part of today's party leadership". In: diepresse.com . February 3, 2020, accessed July 20, 2020.
  27. ↑ Oliver Rathkolb: The Phantom Historians Commission. In: derstandard.at . February 4, 2020, accessed July 20, 2020.
  28. ^ "Hodgepodge": Historians torn apart FPÖ historians' report. In: orf.at . February 3, 2020, accessed July 20, 2020.
  29. ↑ a b Maria Sterkl: FPÖ report relativizes its own Nazi references, historians say. In: derstandard.at . February 3, 2020, accessed July 20, 2020.
  30. ^ FPÖ historical report: "A superficial work". In: wienerzeitung.at . February 4, 2020, accessed July 20, 2020.