Siegfried Kampl

Siegfried Kampl (born August 13, 1936 in Steuerberg , Carinthia ) is an Austrian politician. He has been mayor of Gurk since 1991 and was a member of the Austrian Federal Council for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and for the Alliance Future Austria (BZÖ) and Die Freiheitlichen in Kärnten (FPK) from 2004 to 2005 .

School and political career

Kampl completed the agricultural vocational school and an agricultural technical school. In 1960 he married Elisabeth Bucher and in 1962 took over a farm in Reichenhaus (municipality of Gurk). In 1974 Kampl was elected local party leader of the FPÖ Gurk, two years later he became district party leader of the FPÖ Sankt Veit an der Glan . After moving into the Gurk City Council in 1979, he was immediately elected Vice Mayor and held this position for twelve years. In addition, he sat for the FPÖ in the Carinthian state parliament between 1982 and 1994 and was Vice President of the Carinthian Association of Municipalities for eleven years . In 1991 Kampl was elected mayor of Gurk with 53.4 percent of the vote. In the election to the Carinthian state parliament in 2004, Kampl was once again involved at the state level and was part of the FPÖ negotiating team for government negotiations with the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). In 2004 he was sent by the liberal club in the Carinthian state parliament to the Austrian Federal Council , of which he was a member until 2005.

Kampl was considered a "veteran" in the FPÖ and was a supporter of Jörg Haider from the start , whom he carried on shoulders together with Reinhart Gaugg when he became party chairman of the FPÖ at the Innsbruck FPÖ party conference in 1986 . When Haider founded the BZÖ in 2005 as a spin-off from the FPÖ, he followed him to the newly founded party. After Haider's death in 2008, several Carinthian BZÖ politicians, including Kampl, split from the BZÖ under the name "Die Freiheitlichen in Kärnten - Freedom Party of Carinthia (FPK)" and approached the FPÖ again, initially in a cooperation " according to the CDU / CSU model "until the FPK was re-integrated as a regional group in the FPÖ after the loss of the state elections in Carinthia in 2013 . So Kampl worked one after the other as FPÖ, BZÖ, FPK and finally again FPÖ politician. In September 2014 he was expelled from the FPÖ after expressly refusing to distance himself from National Socialism in an interview with the Kleine Zeitung . In 2017 the exclusion was lifted due to a formal error. He resigned from the party in August 2017.

Kampl scandals

A speech by Kampl at the Federal Council on April 14, 2005, in which he spoke out against the rehabilitation of Wehrmacht deserters , caused political, media and public attention . In it, he described Wehrmacht deserters as "some comrade murderers" and said that after the end of the Second World War and the National Socialist rule in Austria there had been "brutal Nazi persecution". He and his family also had to suffer from the post-war situation ("I felt it with full brutality - five siblings, mother died in 1944, father three years in Wolfsberg"). It was not mentioned why his father Franz Kampl (born 1904) was imprisoned in the British internment camp in Wolfsberg . Kampl sen. had already joined the NSDAP in 1934, which was banned in Austria at the time . After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, the young farmer rose to the position of local group leader in his home town of Steuerberg . In 1940 he denounced a woman after she criticized Hitler and the war. For this he was reported by this same woman in 1946 according to Section 7 of the War Crimes Act . The trial on June 25, 1948 in Klagenfurt ended with the sentencing to 10 months imprisonment , which he did not have to serve because the time in the internment camp (1945-1947) was credited to him.

Especially in the anniversary year 2005 (60 years of the end of the war, 50 years of the Austrian State Treaty and resolution of Austrian neutrality ) Kampl had triggered outrage among the SPÖ and the Greens with his statements about deserters and a "brutal Nazi persecution" and was finally also on the part of the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) , the coalition partner of the BZÖ at federal level, urged to resign. On April 28, 2005, he resigned his mandate from the Federal Council and his membership in the BZÖ, but revised the first decision on the following day and justified this decision with criticism of himself by the incumbent Federal Council President Georg Pehm (SPÖ).

According to the legal situation in force at the time, Kampl should have assumed the office of President of the Federal Council on July 1, 2005 , without the Federal Council or the Carinthian State Parliament being able to influence this. At the urging of the opposition, the government drafted a constitutional amendment ( Lex Kampl , which came into force on June 25, 2005), which made it possible for someone else to take the place of Kampl's Federal Councilor. The amendment to the constitution stipulated that the order of candidates for office can be changed by the respective state parliaments. The president elected in this way must, however, come from the same party as the one previously ranked first.

As the news magazine profil reported, Kampl had already made relevant statements in the past (1991):

• “If Hitler had n't existed, Austria would now be communist” or
• "If the thirty-eight year hadn't happened, half of the farms would have had to close." (What is meant is the "Anschluss" of Austria to the German Reich on March 12, 1938)

In September 2014, in an interview with the Kleine Zeitung in the run-up to the municipal council and mayoral elections in Carinthia in 2015 , in which he was planning to run again as FPÖ candidate for mayor of Gurk, he was asked if he would take this opportunity to vote Want to distance National Socialism. His answer ("I only distance myself from what you have done, not from National Socialism. You can't say that it was partly bad.") Led to the exclusion from the party on the day of publication.

See also

• History revisionism

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Kleine Zeitung : FPÖ excluded Carinthian mayor from party , September 17, 2014
2. ↑ NS-Sager: New attempt to expel Kampl. orf.at of August 7, 2017
3. ↑ orf.at: NS-Sager: Kampl resigned from FPÖ . Article dated August 7, 2017, accessed August 7, 2017.
4. ↑ Stenographic minutes of the 720th meeting of the Federal Council of the Republic of Austria (PDF)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Page 125 (April 14, 2005)  
5. ↑ profile : The Kampl sen. , April 23, 2005
6. ↑ profile : Report: Im Tal der Treuen , June 4, 2005
7. ↑ Kleine Zeitung : "The human would be lost" . 17th September 2014

Web links

• Siegfried Kampl on the website of the Austrian Parliament
• Gudenus, Freunschlag and Kampl: Feeling good in the brown swamp , article by Bernhard Tor in Hagalil , June 9, 2005