Burschenschaften—German Nationalist Dueling Fraternities

By Stan Nadel

Anyone who has paid any attention to political developments in Austria of late is aware that these fraternities have been in the news a lot. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has become a coalition partner in the new government and the activities of members of these fraternities (and their sister sororities) have brought them to the forefront of public attention.  This is especially because of their neo-Nazism and virulent Antisemitism—the recently exposed Germania song book that includes the line “step on the gas old Germanians, we can make it seven million” calling for extending the Holocaust from its six million dead Jews by another million is a prime example. The fact that the vice-president of the Germania branch that produced this song book is the lead candidate for the FPÖ in the current election in Lower Austria has made it a major scandal. But the members of these organizations are now deeply embedded in the Austrian government.

          FPÖ leader and Vice-Chancellor H.C. Strache and Norbert Hofer, the FPÖ’s recent candidate for the Presidency and now minister for transportation & technology, are both members of these Fraternities (Vandalia and Marko-Germania respectively) while the FPÖ 3^rd president of the parliament is a member of 2 of their sister sororities (Iduna and Sigrid), but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Nine of the leading office holders working for them are also members, as are at least five of the leading officials in the FPÖ’s other ministries: Social & Family, Interior (police) and Defense—we can only say at least five because the FPÖ led Defense Ministry has refused to identify its leading office holders.  Reinforcing their influence and power in the FPÖ is the fact that 40% of the FPÖ’s members of parliament are also life-long members of these organizations.

          These fraternities have deep roots in Austria and Germany going back to the early 19^th century and the Napoleonic wars.  German students were mobilized by nationalist sentiment to volunteer to fight against French hegemony in the German speaking lands and after the defeat of Napoleon they organized fraternities to promote their newly formed German nationalist ideology.  Their first major public appearance was in 1817 when they assembled for a festival in Wartburg Germany. The leading speaker was the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries who called for Germans to repeal the laws granting Jews equality that had been passed under French influence, to introduce various legal restrictions against them, and to require them to wear distinctive marks on their clothing (like the yellow circle of the late middle ages and the yellow star of the Nazis). The festival concluded with a public burning of books by Jews and advocates of Jewish equality along with the Napoleonic Code which had given all citizens equal rights regardless of religion.

The Wartburg Festival book burning in 1817

 

                             In 2017 the FPÖ’s parliamentary president Anneliese Kitzmüller and 
                               two other prominent FPÖ office holders attended the celebration of 
                               the 200^th anniversary of the Wartburg festival in Germany

Two years later fraternity members played a leading role in the so-called Hep-Hep Riots, three months of violent attacks against Jewish communities in dozens of German cities in lands that had not (yet) repealed the Jewish equality laws of the Napoleonic era.

                                                       The 1819 Hep-Hep riot in Frankfurt,

The riots stopped when the laws were repealed.

          The fraternities were mostly known for drinking, dueling and rioting for decades after that, but as German nationalists who advocated the creation of a unified German nation state they were hostile to the rulers of the 39 states of the German Confederation who stood in the way of a united Germany.  So when liberal German nationalist revolutions broke out in the German states in 1848 fraternity members rallied to the cause and fought for the creation of a German Republic—though they sometimes objected to allowing Jews to join the cause. The revolutions of 1848-1850 failed, but the German nationalist fraternities in more recent years have pointed to their 1848 forbearers as politically acceptable fig leaves for their reprehensible politics.

          For a few decades the German nationalist fraternities were identified with the liberalism of the 1848 revolutions and they included Jews and socialists as members, but with the revival of Jew hatred in the newly racialized form of Antisemitism in the 1870s they soon turned against their Jewish members though there was stiff opposition from within the movement at first.  First Jews were declared to be dishonorable, and thus not worthy of being allowed to initiate dues with those fraternity members who insulted them, and then they were expelled and banned from membership—in 1896 the Austrian fraternities met in Waidhofen and adopted a resolution banning Jews from membership on  “racial” grounds,” a so-called “Aryan paragraph.” Almost all of the German Nationalist fraternities and sororities in Austria today still include this Waidhofen rule in their statutes either formally or informally.

          As one might expect, in the 1920s and 1930s the German Nationalist fraternities were increasingly attracted to Nazism by the similarities in their ideologies and they welcomed the German Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 as a fulfillment of their long standing goal.  While their organizations were shut down during the Nazi years, most of their members made prominent careers in the Nazi regime—especially in the SS and the Gestapo.

          The first post WWII celebration by one of these fraternities, the Almania, took place in the Salzburg Glassenbach prison camp for leading Nazis and SS members. For decades afterwards the fraternities mourned the loss of WII and they still memorialize their many members who “were interned in camps and prisons only because they had identified with and remained loyal to their Volk.” One branch of the Germania recently identified its glory years as the 1930s with a picture of a leading member from the time—without mentioning his career in the SS and Gestapo where he oversaw torturers and murderers in Vienna, occupied Ukraine, and occupied Italy.

          In 1959 they held a torchlight parade in Vienna where they wore parts of their Hitler Youth and SS uniforms—and fought with protestors who had survived the Nazi concentration camps.  When leftist students protested against an Antisemitic professor at the University of Vienna, fraternity members countered by parading with a banner saying “Hoch Auschwitz” and attacking leftists—they beat a concentration camp survivor to death when he objected.

          Since the 1980s various fraternities have invited Holocaust deniers to give speeches to their members, denying the Holocaust even as they were praising t in other settings. A leading FPÖ figure today who recently served as the party’s 3^rd president of the parliament is Martin Graf—who led the security team at one such presentation at his Olympia fraternity in 1987. Many members at the time also participated in neo-Nazi political and paramilitary exercises—party leader and now vice-chancellor H.C. Strache was arrested at a neo-Nazi demonstration in Germany and was photographed taking part in a neo-Nazi paramilitary training camp that was restricted to trusted members of Austria’s leading neo-Nazi organization at the time.  They also organized annual public ceremonies of mourning on Vienna’s Heldenplatz on the date of the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945--ceremonies that continued until they were finally preempted in 2013 by an annual festival of joy.

Burschenschafter May 8 protests

Festival of Joy celebrating May 8, 1945

          With this we are approaching the 1997 republication of the Germania song book that started our investigation. While FPÖ lead candidate Landbauer was too young to have been involved in 1997 and claims he has no knowledge of what is in that song book, he was the leader of a small Young Patriots organization that published another song book in 2010 that included a number of old Nazi standbys including the theme song of the BDM, the equivalent of the Hitler Youth for girls—Landbauer can’t claim ignorance about this one because he wrote the introduction and the advertisement promoting it.  More recently along these lines the Olympia sponsored a concert by a neo-Nazi singer in 2103 who was famous for his hit song (in neo-Nazi circles) that included the lines “With six million Jews the fun has just begun, for six million Jews the oven is open …we have plenty of zyklon B…”  In 2008 globalization reached the ranks of the Germania in Vienna when they dressed in Klu Klux Klan robes.

 

Thanks to the internet in recent years strong ties have developed between the fraternities and the so-called “Identitarians” who are linked to American White Identity movement—their graffiti in Salzburg featured “1488,” a neo-Nazi code that combined the 88 that stands for Heil Hitler (H is the 8^th letter of the alphabet) with the US white power slogan 14 words ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children").

In 2011 the association of German Nationalist Fraternities in Germany was roiled when one of their member organizations enrolled a member who was of Vietnamese ancestry. The dispute that followed led to the secession of a group of more liberal, or at least less racist, fraternities who set up their own federation in opposition to those who insisted on “German racial purity.” In contrast to their German counterparts the Austrian fraternities have remained united.   In 2012 they issued a statement about the importance of “naturally created differences… between members of different races” to reiterate their Aryans only membership rule.

So now we have clarified the background of the Burschenschaft dueling fraternities, their role in the Austrian Freedom Party, and their role in the new Austrian coalition government. You can spot them by the peculiar fraternity caps they wear when they hold their ceremonies, and by the dueling scars many of them proudly sport on their cheeks even when they are not in costume.