Holocaust survivors chide Austria's Kurz on anti-Semitism effort
VIENNA - A group representing Austrian Holocaust survivors voiced outrage on Wednesday over staffing shortages in a government department dealing with Nazi-related crimes, calling on Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to take action.
Kurz, a conservative governing in coalition with a far-right party founded by ex-Nazis, has repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism and the Holocaust since taking office just over a year ago. His government has pledged to offer citizenship to the descendants of Austrians who fled the country under Nazi rule.
But a department at the main domestic intelligence agency that handles reports of Nazi-related crimes is understaffed to the point of having a large backlog, according to the Mauthausen Committee, which represents survivors of Austria's biggest Nazi-era concentration camp.
"The government - and in particular the chancellor - stresses at every opportunity that everything is being done to fight neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism effectively," the committee said in a statement.
"In fact the Nazism-reporting department is being denied the necessary staff, to the point that it has a backlog of hundreds of pieces of evidence and some far-right crimes are falling under statutes of limitations," it said, adding that it mainly gets no reply when it passes on information to the department.
