Austria's Freedom Party was rattled Tuesday by fresh accusations that its ranks are steeped in anti-Semitism after a second student fraternity affiliated with it was found to have a songbook containing anti-Semitic lyrics making fun of the Holocaust and calling for the murder of Jews.
The Vienna-based magazine Falter reported it had found a songbook, used by the fraternity "Bruna Sudetia," that includes songs celebrating the Holocaust and lyrics calling for the fusion of Germany and Austria to form a new "German Empire."
According to the Deutsche Welle website, a line in one song reads, "In their midst comes the Jew Ben Gurion / Step on the gas, old Germanics, we can make it to seven million."
David Ben-Gurion was Israel's first prime minister.
Another song reads: "Two Jews swam in the Nile River / a crocodile ate one of them, at the other it merely stared / at that it almost puked the first one up."
A song dating from 1972, when Germany was divided into West and East, includes the line, "Germany is still separated into three parts" followed by, "long live exalted German-Austria, and with it the entire German Empire."
The first case, reported by Falter three weeks ago, found that a songbook used by the "Germania zu Wiener Neustadt" fraternity contains songs that celebrate Nazi atrocities and use anti-Semitic and racist language.
The case prompted the resignation of Udo Landbauer, a senior member of the Freedom Party who was the fraternity's deputy leader. Landbauer was the party's top candidate for the regional parliament in Lower Austria, the province surrounding Vienna.
After initially refusing to sack him, the party later said it was setting up a committee of historians that would examine its past and that of right-wing fraternities like Landbauer's, which are often close to the FPO but not formally part of it.
Tuesday's report in Falter said that the head of the Vienna-based Bruna Sudetia is on Infrastructure Minister Norbert Hofer's staff.
The staffer, Herwig Goetschober, who works on social media, was not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for Hofer said Goetschober was sick but denied knowledge of the lyrics published by Falter, adding that his songbook had a different content and layout.
"He has no knowledge of this other songbook. He also does not know who produced it," the spokesman said.
The party, a partner in the ruling coalition, said it has abandoned its neo-Nazi past and rejects anti-Semitism. It now focuses its criticism on Islam and even openly courts Jewish voters.
But the main group representing Austria's tiny Jewish community, the IKG, says the Freedom Party has done too little to address the long-standing anti-Semitism within its ranks. It sees fraternities as a breeding ground for the problem.
The IKG has also questioned whether the party's historical commission will get to the bottom of anti-Semitism within fraternities. Many senior political party figures belong to a fraternity but the FPO has said it cannot force those organizations to cooperate with the commission.
"If it is true that the FPO cannot control the fraternities, then that probably confirms that fraternity members control the FPO," IKG chief Oskar Deutsch told ORF radio at the weekend.
