Austria is taking steps to dissolve a student fraternity with links to the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ), the junior partner in its governing coalition, after the emergence of a songbook in which the group mocked victims of the Holocaust and celebrated Nazi atrocities.

The chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, said on Wednesday he would launch proceedings to dissolve the Burschenschaft Germania zu Wiener Neustadt fraternity, whose former vice-chairman Udo Landbauer ran as a candidate for the FPÖ, at last weekend’s state elections in Lower Austria.

The decision comes a week after Falter, a Viennese weekly newspaper, published lyrics from a songbook used by the fraternity, including lines such as “Step on the gas, you ancient Germanic peoples, we’ll manage the seventh million”, a reference to the 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis during the second world war.

The songbook, which was reissued as recently as 1997, also contains songs glorifying the Wehrmacht.

On Thursday Landbauer, who is of mixed Austrian-Iranian heritage, said he was resigning from all political functions because of a “media witch” hunt. He claimed to have been aware only of an edition of the songbook in which offensive passages were blackened out or pages torn out.

The move to dissolve Germania is symbolically significant because a large number of politicians in the FPÖ, the junior coalition partner to Kurz’s Austrian People’s party since last December, have ties to student fraternities.

Eighteen out of the party’s 51 MPs, including five of its six chairmen, are active members of burschenschaften, many of which have traditionally aligned themselves with the idea that Austria belongs to an ethnicity-based “Greater Germany”.

Heinz-Christian Strache, the Austrian vice-chancellor, on Friday insisted that “antisemitism, totalitarianism [and] racism are the opposite of fraternity thinking”. The party has so far made no move to expel Landbauer.



In spite of the scandal, the FPÖ managed to improve its result at the Lower Austria state elections by six percentage points, coming third behind the centre-right Austrian People’s party and the centre-left Social Democratic party.