‘Step on the gas’: Austria seeks to abolish nationalist fraternity over Nazi songbook celebrating Holocaust

Austria’s government said Wednesday that it plans to dissolve one of the country’s controversial nationalist fraternities after it emerged that it had printed song texts celebrating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.

The lyrics in the book produced in 1997 by the Germania zu Wiener Neustadt organisation included “Step on the gas … we can make it to seven million”, media reports said.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust during World War II, many of them in gas chambers.

Other songs in the book, which only became public last week, praised the Waffen SS and Nazi paratroopers behind war crimes committed in Greece.

The scandal took on a political dimension because until recently the fraternity’s vice-chairman was Udo Landbauer, a candidate for the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) in local elections in Lower Austria state last Sunday.

It also put Chancellor Sebastian Kurz under pressure since he had formed a coalition at federal level in December with the anti-immigration, Islamaphobic FPOe.

Several leading members of the FPOe – a party created by former Nazis in the 1950s – belong to student fraternities, many of which believe in reunifying Austria into a “Greater Germany”.