So far Arnold Schwarzenegger's most publicized family ties have been his marriage to a Kennedy, but his bid to become governor of California has thrown the spotlight onto his father's Nazi past.

The late Gustav Shwarzenegger, a small-town policeman, applied to become a member of Hitler's National Socialist Party in 1938 and enlisted into the German army on April 28, 1939, according to documents held at the state archives in Vienna and Berlin.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

His war record shows that he joined the military police and took part in the invasions of Poland and France before serving on the Russian front during the siege of Leningrad in September 1941.

In February 1944, Schwarzenegger senior successfully applied to be discharged from the army, stating that he had been wounded and was suffering from malaria.

US media have made much of his Nazi party membership and military career, which ended three years before his famous son was born, since the Republican actor announced his decision to run against Democratic Governor Gray Davis.

But in Austria, a country that took 50 years to admit colluding with the Nazis, it has not rated a mention in press reports celebrating Schwarzenegger's candidacy and his Austrian roots.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which urges the persecution of Nazi war criminals, said this week that the Terminator actor had in 1990 asked it to probe his father's past.

"He said that they never spoke about it at home, and were not taught about the Holocaust at school in Austria," Rabbi Mervyn Hier, the founder of the Center and a friend of Schwarzenegger, told AFP this week.

"His father was an early Nazi. He asked to become a member before the Anschluss" when Hitler's troops occupied Austria on March 11, 1938, he added.

Hier said the Center found Schwarzenegger's party application form from 1938 and a document confirming membership, dated January 1941, in the German archives that were held in Washington before being returned to Berlin after the unification of Germany.

His military records only became declassified 30 years after his death in 1972.

"We have since 2002 been looking into exactly what he did as part of the Wehrmacht's unit 521 and will publish what we find in a few weeks," Hier said.

Ursula Schwarz, a historian at Vienna's Documentation Center for Austrian Resistance, said she believed Gustav Schwarzenegger's war record was run of the mill for an Austrian of his generation.

"He had absolutely no choice on going to the army, almost no man in Austria escaped that," she told AFP.

"Where he had a choice, but a hard one, was on joining the Nazi party. He was a policeman, so it was good for his career."

Records held at the Center, show that Schwarzenegger was probed for and cleared of war crimes along with 43 other "low-ranking party members" and allowed to resume his job as policeman in 1947.

Austrian political scientist Peter Ulraum said in a 1987 survey, 15 percent of Austrians born before the war admitted they or relatives had been members of the Nazi party, but a third of these claimed they never believed in its ideology.

"From 1936 onwards people could see what was going to happen and joining the Nazis was often just opportunism."

He said in Schwarzenegger's case, Austrians and the local press have taken no notice of his family record partly because they were interested in him as a celebrity and not in his political ideals.

"Most Austrians barely knew where California was and did not have a clue that he was a Republican candidate. For them he is just an Austrian boy who has made good."

Schwarzenegger's image abroad suffered in 1986 when he invited Austrian president Kurt Waldheim to his wedding after it emerged that the former UN secretary general had long concealed that he fought in a German army commando accused of atrocities.

But following that debacle Schwarzenegger has made donations to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and publicly denounced Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider, who caused outrage by praising Hitler's SS troops.

This week a senior official of Austria's Jewish Cultural Society said it believed that the actor had redeemed the past.

"That his father was a Nazi, does not mean he has the same views. As far as we can tell, he has a good reputation on Jewish matters in California."

Copyright 2003 AFP

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