- guardian.co.uk, Monday July 10 2000 01.09 BST
All four parliamentary parties voted on Friday in favour of a 6bn Schilling (about £275m) fund to be shared among the 150,000 Jewish and other slave labourers still alive. The government has pledged to provide at least half of the money and industry is expected to come up with the rest.
But business people close to Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel's Austrian People's party have criticised the fund. In today's issue of the news magazine Profil, a leading industrialist said the demands were an "absolute injustice".
"Hitler killed 20 million people, Stalin 100 million. But nobody demands anything from Russia. Not only that but those who did the real forced labour are no longer alive," said Johannes Asamer, a gravel producer from the province of Upper Austria. He added: "The Jews are exerting so much pressure, that soon they'll get it in the neck again.
"The six billion will have to be paid, because America puts pressure on us. That's pure blackmail."
He said he would refuse to pay. Another well-known industrialist and aristocrat, Carl Anton Goess-Sarau, chair of the supervisory board of a carton-producing conglomerate, Mary Meinhof, is also quoted as saying he would not contribute to what he called an unfair supplementary business tax.
"I was a prisoner of war in Russia myself, but I would never have considered the idea of demanding something from the Russians," he said. "The fact is there was a war going on then and because of that you can't make demands today."
Their views will do little to improve Austria's image, coming after the EU imposed sanctions and announced a team to monitor the country after the far right Freedom Party of Jörg Haider joined the government.
The government has ordered a referendum in the autumn on the sanctions. Members of the FPO have now said they also want a referendum on the compensation fund. Andrea Mölzer, the FPO's cultural adviser, told Profil: "Morally we're certainly not obliged to pay anything, but in the real world of politics that argument won't wash and we'll simply have to pay up."
In February Mr Schüssel asked Maria Schaumayer, former president of the Austrian national bank, to form a compensation plan. The move was interpreted as an attempt to limit concerns that Austria had lurched to the right with the entry into government a few days previously of the FPO.
Unlike Germany, which has paid the equivalent of about £36bn to the Nazis' victims since 1951, Austria avoided paying for decades, claiming it was a victim of Nazism rather than a willing collaborator.
