Haaretz
Tevet 10, 5766
VIENNA - Austrian law
authorities have begun investigating claims that photos now removed from
the Internet had shown supporters of a soccer club in Adolf Hitler's home
town raising their arms in the Nazi salute.
Austrian news media
described several photos, including a particularly jarring one of several
youthful "Braunau Bulldogs" - fans of the second-division Braunau soccer
club - carrying a club banner and with arms raised high while visiting the
former Mauthausen concentration camp. Others showed several youthful fans
making the same gesture while gathered in a pizzeria in the nearby town of
Pasching, the news media said.
Braunau Mayor Gerhard Skiba said
that he met with fan club officials on Monday, and that "they did not
deny" that the photos had been displayed on the club's Web
site.
Club officials were not answering their cell phones on
Monday.
Skiba, in a phone call from Braunau, said he had seen 12
photos connected with the allegations, but could not say if all had been
posted on the club's Web site.
Austrian media said the pictures,
taken two years ago, were on view until late last year on the fan club's
Web site, but were taken off shortly before Christmas. All the fans in the
photos appeared to be in their teens, some of them possibly younger than
15, said Skiba.
Police in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria
province, confirmed that a legal investigation into the affair had begun,
but they declined to offer details.
Austrian news reports said fan
club officials offered their apologies on line over the weekend, and
distanced the club from extremism of all kinds. On Monday, the club's Web
site displayed a racist and sexist joke - and hundreds of e-mails critical
of the photos - but no apology.
Hitler was born in Braunau in 1889.
Though his family moved a few years later, the town on the border with
Germany remains a shrine for rightist extremists.
Mauthausen, about
100 kilometers to the east of Braunau, was the site of Austria's largest
Nazi concentration camp. Over half of its 200,000 inmates were shot,
gassed, beaten or worked to death in the main camp or its
affiliates.
Skiba said he planned to meet with members of the fan
club "to find out their motivation and to make sure that youths do not
display such behavior."