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After AfD affair: Criticism of Kickl over earlier SS remark

by AI | 24.May 2024 | Europe in brief AI

After the German AfD was expelled from the far-right ID faction due to statements made by its European top candidate Maximilian Krah about the SS, older statements by the Austrian right-wing politician Herbert Kickl have now resurfaced. According to the magazine “profil,” Kickl said in a TV debate in 2010 that one cannot collectively condemn the Waffen-SS.

In a TV debate in 2010, Kickl rejected a collective condemnation of the members of the Waffen-SS as "nonsense." - Photo: APA/Helmut Fohringer

Vienna – After the excitement over statements by the German AfD top candidate for the EU election, Maximilian Krah, about the SS, a similar statement from FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl from 2010 is causing criticism. In an ATV discussion, the then FPÖ General Secretary, in response to the then President of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), Ariel Muzicant, rejected a collective condemnation of the members of the Waffen-SS as “nonsense,” as “Profil” first reported on Friday.

“We will not be able to agree on condemning an association as such or a unit like the Waffen-SS collectively guilty,” said Kickl in the debate 14 years ago. Guilt is something individual just as innocence is something individual, argued Kickl. To Muzicant’s objection that the Waffen-SS was classified as a criminal organization in the Nuremberg Trials, Kickl countered that it was “just as nonsensical” if there was a “collective presumption of innocence” for the Wehrmacht.

The widely spread statements on Friday received criticism from SPÖ and ÖVP. It is not surprising that the FPÖ voted against the exclusion of the AfD from the joint right-wing faction ID in the EU Parliament: “No, Kickl himself trivialized the Waffen-SS,” the SPÖ said on the short message service X. “These statements by Herbert Kickl are a trivialization of the atrocities of National Socialism and reveal Kickl’s worldview,” criticized ÖVP General Secretary Christian Stocker. “Anyone who conducts politics with such a mindset has no place in a democratic party spectrum,” Stocker said. It is to be hoped “that the moderate forces within the Freedom Party will come to their senses and put an end to Kickl’s antics.”

The FPÖ did not want to comment on Friday. The day before, the German AfD was excluded from the right-wing faction ID, which, in addition to the FPÖ, also includes the French party Rassemblement National and the Italian Lega. Previously, the AfD deputy and top candidate Krah had caused sharp criticism within the faction, among other things, with the statement that not every SS man was a criminal. The FPÖ voted on Thursday for Krah’s exclusion but did not support that of the entire AfD delegation. (24.05.2024)