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08. 03. 10. - 15:00

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08. 03. 10. - 15:00

Mauthausen wall defaced again

The outer wall of the former Nazi concentration and death camp at Mauthausen, Upper Austria, was defaced again last Friday night, police said.

An unknown party wrote "The blood of Turks and Jews is poisonous," said Michael Tischlinger, the head of the provincial office for protection of the constitution and the fight against terrorism.

He said the words were written in the same place as other neo-Nazi slogans had been written in February 2009 and the letters were the same colour and size as those on the wall in that incident. That meant the same party might be responsible for both incidents, he added.

Last year, President Heinz Fischer deplored the defacement of the camp’s outer wall. In a letter to the International Mauthausen Committee, he said: "I hope it was an isolated incident. My office has been in contact with the interior ministry, and I can assure you our security authorities are intensively investigating the incident.

"The perpetrators will be brought to justice if they are apprehended. I have been informed security has been tightened at the memorial. Austria and its constitutional organs hold the Mauthausen memorial in the highest respect," he added.

The words, "The progeny of Muslims are for us what the Jews were to our fathers. Be on your guard. A third world war – an eighth crusade," were spray-painted in 70-centimetre-high letters on the outer wall at the memorial’s entrance.

In response, Mauthausen Committee Austria Chairman Willi Mernyi called the defacement "a radical-right provocation" and said it constituted "a wholly new dimension of right-wing extremism." He added the choice of words showed the perpetrators were familiar with Nazi hate language.

The Austrian Islamic Denomination appealed to politicians and to civil society to take "the frightening signal" seriously and to undertake measures to promote more public consciousness of the situation in Austrian society.

The Nazis imprisoned a total of around 200,000 people at Mauthausen, of whom around half did not survive the experience.

Austrian Times

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