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Politician resigns after ‘Hitler salute’ photo

The district chairman for the right-wing Freedom Party in Tulln, Lower Austria, has resigned after a photo surfaced of him and two friends appearing to make a Hitler salute.

Published: 17 November 2014 17:09 CET
Politician resigns after 'Hitler salute' photo
The FPÖ has made headlines in Lower Austria. Photo: FPÖ campaign poster

The photo of Andreas Bors, 25, was leaked to the local Bezirksblätter paper and was reportedly taken at a New Year’s Eve celebration in 2006.

Bors denied that the snapshot showed him giving a Hitler salute, and said that witnesses could confirm that he and his friends had been singing football songs.


Photo: Image courtesy of Bezirksblätter.

He told the Kurier newspaper that “in my opinion I’m not guilty. I was 17-years-old and alcohol was involved”. He said he had never had anything to do with National Socialism and that the eight-year-old photo had been leaked to the press in a “politically motivated act”.

The Bezirksblätter confronted the regional FPÖ party with the photo on Monday morning and by midday Bors had handed in his resignation. He was slated to be the FPÖ’s number one candidate for local elections in Tulln on January 25th.

The Lower Austrian branch of the FPÖ has been making headlines in recent weeks – the state party chairman Christian Höbart called asylum seekers “cavemen” and an internet video showed an FPÖ chairwoman, Sabine Singer, clearly under the influence of alcohol and unable to walk unaided.

In neighbouring Burgenland an FPÖ functionary has been remanded in custody after shooting a 13-year-old girl in the pelvis.

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POLITICS

Austria decries fake blood attack at anti-Semitism event

Austria's minister in charge of Europe on Tuesday hit out at an "attack on our values" after a man threw fake blood at an anti-Semitism conference in Vienna.

Published: 8 May 2024 10:41 CEST
Austria decries fake blood attack at anti-Semitism event

As elsewhere in Europe, anti-Semitic acts have been on the rise in Austria since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out.

A man on Monday poured several litres of fake blood at the entrance to a building in downtown Vienna, where government, Jewish and civil society representatives were meeting to discuss anti-Semitism in Europe.

Police were able to prevent conference participants, including Austria’s minister in charge of Europe, Karoline Edtstadler, from being hit.

“It was not just an attack against me, but also an attack against our values,” Edtstadler said on Tuesday.

Chancellor Karl Nehammer also said the assault had “crossed the line”.

The man behind the attack told Austrian news agency APA that he was a member of the Jewish community wanting to protest Austria’s “normalisation of a genocide”, referring to Israel’s actions in the Gaza war against Hamas.

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in Austria has increased from an average of two a day in 2022 to eight a day since last October, according to the country’s Jewish community association that keeps track of such events.

That was the month when Palestinian group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Militants also seized around 250 hostages, with an estimated 128 remaining in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military says are dead.

That sparked war, with Israel vowing to destroy Hamas and launching a retaliatory offensive that has killed at least 34,789 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

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