Austrian In Choppy Water Over Polish Remark
The Vienna city council on Wednesday lifted the immunity of a politician who suggested that Nazi gas chambers were found in Poland, but not anywhere else in the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler.
The council voted unanimously to strip John Gudenus, a legislator in Austria's upper house of parliament, of protection from prosecution for his remarks. Gudenus could now face prosecution under a law that prohibits people from trying to diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust.
Ingrid Luttenberger, a spokeswoman for Vienna's Mayor Michael Haeupl, said the vote sends a message that such remarks will not be tolerated in Austria.
"There is no space in the room for someone who says, ooh, I'm not so sure (about the Holocaust)," she said.
The Vienna council can lift Gudenus' immunity because, like the councils in Austria's eight other provinces, it selects members for the upper house of parliament. The legislators in the largely powerless body are supposed to safeguard provincial interests.
Critics have pressured Gudenus to resign since he declared in a television interview in April that the existence of gas chambers should be "seriously debated." In a later interview, he amended the remarks to say that "there were gas chambers, though not in the Third Reich but in Poland."