Justice at last for Austrian WW II "traitors" (News Feature)

By Miriam Bandar and Albert Otti Oct 24, 2009, 2:08 GMT

Vienna - Decades after the Austrian Richard Wadani fled the German Wehrmacht in 1944, he has won the fight of his life.

This week, Austria's parliament rehabilitated those who deserted in World War II from Hitler's army.

'After 60 years of discrimination, justice has prevailed at last,' said Wadani, 87, who heads a committee fighting for the rights of deserters in Vienna.

The parliament passed its bill against the votes of the far-right Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria, whose legislators suggested that deserters were criminals.

Wadani is used to such arguments. 'In Austria, we were treated like swine - the others were considered dutiful, honest and loyal people,' he said, describing the decades following the end of the war.

Even today, 'deserter' was synonymous with 'traitor' and 'swine comrade,' he told the German Press Agency dpa.

Freedom Party chief Heinz-Christian Strache said that such people should not be glorified.

'They were often murderers,' he told Austrian press agency APA.

Instead of acquitting those 'who may have shot and killed their own mates and soldiers,' every case should be investigated individually, Strache said.

Historians say that such views are populist, but are not supported by facts.

'The statement that deserters were murderers of their own mates is untenable,' said Stephan Roth, a researcher at the Vienna-based Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance.

Many soldiers fled the Wehrmacht in the chaotic last phase of the war or did not want to follow the National Socialist regime, he said.

After Wadani deserted in France, the Social Democrat spent the end of the war as a soldier of the Czech army in Britain.

When he returned to Austria, he was deemed a slacker, and authorities and potential employers shunned him.

'When you joined a company in the 60s or 70s, the first question was, 'where did you serve?'', Roth said. Deserters fell out of favour, he explained.

Today, the atmosphere is less hostile, Wadani said, but many deserters are still afraid to share their past. This is the main reason why there are no figures about the surviving soldiers who fled.

The bill passed in parliament on Wednesday rehabilitates all those who received verdicts from certain Nazi courts, regardless of the defendant's nationality. This includes verdicts against homosexuals and women who had to undergo forced sterilizations.

Germany's parliament rehabilitated all so-called Nazi-era 'war traitors' in September.