Jörg Haider: Encyclopedia II - Jörg Haider - Early life

Jörg Haider - Early life

Jörg Haider - Haider's parents

Haider's parents were Nazis and early NSDAP party members. However they had different family backgrounds. His father (Robert Haider) was a simple shoemaker and his mother (Dorothea Rupp) was the daughter of a wealthy medical doctor of note who headed the general hospital of Linz. [1] Robert Haider had joined the NSDAP in 1929 as a fifteen year-old boy long before Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany. Robert Haider remained a member even after the Austrian Nazi Party was banned in Austria after Engelbert Dollfuss had dissolved the Austrian parliament and established a Ständestaat, a fascist dictatorship. Robert Haider left Austria in 1933 and moved to Bavaria, returning in 1934 in the wake of the failed Nazi attempt to overthrow the Austrian government. However, after being arrested he returned to Germany where he joined the 'Austrian legion', a division of the Sturmabteilung. [2] [3]

Robert Haider completed a two-year military service in Germany and returned to Austria after it was incorporated into Nazi Germany in 1938 in the events known as the Anschluss. From 1940 onwards he fought as a low-ranking officer on both the Western and Eastern Fronts. After being wounded several times he was discharged from the Wehrmacht with the rank of a Lieutenant. In 1945 he married Dorothea Rupp, who at that time worked as a leader in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM).

Following the end of the war, proceedings against both Haider's parents were conducted to determine what measures should be taken because of their NSDAP membership (proceedings against all former Nazis - NSDAP members and collaborators - were undertaken as a matter of law in both Austria and Germany directly after the war had ended). [4] They were labelled as 'minderbelastet' (meaning only low-ranked in the NSDAP structure) and Robert Haider was forced to work in a shoe factory [5]. Dorothea Haider, who had been a teacher, was prohibited to work for a couple of years following the end of the war.

Jörg Haider - Haider's youth

Jörg Haider was born in the Upper Austrian town of Bad Goisern in 1950, a time when his parent's finances were rather moderate. He was a good student in primary school and attended high school in Bad Ischl despite his parent's financial situation. Haider was reportedly always top of his class in high school. [6]. During his time in Bad Ischl he had first contacts to nationalist organizations, such as the Burschenschaft Albia, a right-winged student group.

After he graduated with highest distinction in 1968, he moved to Vienna to study law. During his studies he was affiliated again with a Burschenschaften such as Silvania. After graduating from University of Vienna with the titel of Dr. iur. in 1973 he was drafted into the Austrian Army where he voluntary spent more than the mandatory nine months (called 'the voluntary one year'). In 1974 he started to work at the University of Vienna law faculty in the department of constitutional law.

Jörg Haider - Haider's rise to power in the FPÖ

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was founded in 1955, and initially was a mixture of various political currents opposed both to the political catholicism of the Austrian People's Party and the left-wing views of the Social Democratic Party of Austria. With its roots in the Pan-German movement, it included both German-nationalist and liberal political views. In 1970 Haider became the leader of the FPÖ youth movement and headed it until 1974. Haider rose rapidly through the party ranks. In 1972, at the age of 22, he was already a well-established leader and was made party affair's manager of the Carinthian FPÖ in 1976. In 1979 he was the youngest electorate of the 183 members of parliament, at age 29. From 1983 his policies became more aggressive, when he rose to party head of the Carinthian FPÖ and started to criticise the leaders of the FPÖ, which at that time was still a minor political movement in Austria with about 5 to 6 % of the votes. [7]

The decisive point of his career came in 1986 when he defeated Austrian Vice Chancellor Norbert Steger in the vote for party leadership at the party convention in September in Innsbruck, as many delegates feared that Steger's liberal political views and his coalition with the Social Democrats threatened the party's existence.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki