Vienna Opens First Public Memorial Listing Holocaust Victims’ Names | World News | US News

The project was first backed in 2018 by a previous coalition government of Schallenberg’s conservatives and the far-right Freedom Party, which was founded in the 1950s and whose first leader had been an SS officer.

Although the Freedom Party (FPO) has long said it has abandoned its anti-Semitic past, it has been plagued by racism and anti-Semitism scandals.

The conservatives now govern with the left-wing Greens.

Another policy put forward under the conservative-FPO government, granting citizenship to the descendants of Austrian Holocaust victims, has been taken up by more than 6,000 people since it was introduced last year, Schallenberg said.

“Too many people stood on Heroes’ Square in March 1938 and celebrated,” Schallenberg said of the huge crowd that greeted Hitler in Vienna.