- guardian.co.uk, Monday June 26 2000 01.22 BST
The propaganda art, depicting jubilant scenes of flag-flying Nazis after Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, are to be restored and transferred to a museum in the province.
The decision has been held up by Mr Haider's allies as proof that the controversial politician, renowned abroad for praising Hitler and hailing SS veterans, has no sympathies with National Socialism.
But his opponents have denounced it as a cheap, populist move aimed at appeasing his critics around the world, and have asked why the paintings were allowed to survive for so long in a building meant to embody democratic values.
The Carinthian-born artist Switbert Lobisser was commissioned by the Nazi party in 1938 to paint the frescoes to decorate the central chamber of the parliament building.
They remained in place when British troops established their base in the building at the end of the war. "They did not cover them up, which I think is grotesque, but then swastikas were everywhere in Austria at that time," the director of the Carinthian Art Gallery in Klagenfurt, Professor Arnulf Rohsmann, said.
The new government which moved back into the building in 1948 cursorily whitewashed the frescoes. They came to light during renovation of the chamber in the 1970s and were restored and left to breathe behind ventilated wooden panels, where they remain today.
Mr Haider, still de facto leader of the Freedom party, even though he has relinquished the formal leadership, and self-appointed chief cultural watchdog of Carinthia, has taken a close interest in the fate of the frescoes.
In removing them, he said, the provincial government hoped to "send out a positive signal to its EU partners", who imposed sanctions on Austria in protest at his party joining the coalition government.
Some say the paintings should be destroyed, others say that would be tantamount to censorship. "If we destroy the pictures we destroy the past," said Wilhelm Wadl, historian at the Carinthian state archives. "That would be to react the same way the Nazis did."
In fact the paintings, regarded as "primitive" and of negligible importance by art critics but of historical value as pieces of propaganda, are subject to a preservation order and cannot be destroyed.
