John Gudenus

John Gudenus (born November 23, 1940 in Vienna) is an Austrian Holocaust denier. Gudenus is a retired member of the Federal Council of Austria on a free mandate (formerly as a member of the Freedom Party of Austria), and colonel of the Austrian Bundesheer. Not only in recent days, he has primarily stirred attention by questioning the existence of gas chambers in the Third Reich and for other National Socialist activities which resulted in a conviction at a Viennese court.

He first became member of an elected political body in 1973 when being elected to the city council of Vienna. In 1990, he became part of the Federal Council. From 1992 to 1995, he was a member of the National Council. He became a member of the Federal Council once again in 1996. When Jörg Haider split off from the Freedom Party to create the Alliance for the Future of Austria split off from the Freedom Party in 2005, he declared his allegiance to the Freedom Party. On April 14, he made the headlines by supporting a proposal for new elections made by the Social Democrats and Green in the Federal Council, in which, for the first time, the government (in which the FPÖ had been replaced by the Alliance for the Future of Austria when most of its leading members changed allegiance) lost its majority in one of the houses of parliament. However, due to the small importance of the Federal Council, this had no consequences.

Views on National Socialism

Gudenus belonged to the far-right wing of the Freedom Party. He has declared himself an opponent of the Austrian law that makes national socialist political movements and the use of national socialist symbols illegal; he rejected the plan of constructing a memorial within the former concentration camp of Mauthausen; and he has called compensation payments to victims of national socialism "protection money". He was forced to resign from the National council in 1995, after having questioned the existence of gas chambers in the Third Reich.

Holocaust denial

On 26 April 2005, he stated that people should not "build up taboos but should research physically and scientifically" and that the question regarding the existence of gas chambers "doesn't have to be answered with yes or no" on a program on the Austrian state television ORF. The following day, he left the Freedom Party to spare it harm caused by the aftermath of this. The Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel of the conservative Austrian People's Party and the president of Austria, Heinz Fischer asked him to resign, the Viennese public attorney office started investigating him, stopped the investigation soon though in correspondence with the ministry of justice. He responded to this by saying that it is "nice, that doubts are allowed. There were gas chambers, but not in the Third Reich. They were in Poland. That's also what it says in the school books. I never doubted the existence of gas chambers in principle." The Green Party sued Gudenus due to this statement, the public attorney office of Vienna relaunched investigations. In spite of criticism, he continues to plan to keep his mandate in the federal council. In 2006, he was sentenced to probation for breaking Austria's laws against denying or diminishing the Holocaust.

External links

* [http://fmueller.net/diss-zsfg_en.html Felix Mueller - The Nazi Prohibition Act in Relation to Freedom of Speech - Legal Background to this Specific Legal Question in the Austrian Constitution]