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16-05-2023
VIANA: Travelers on an intercity train in Austria were startled on Sunday when a recording of an Adolf Hitler speech was played on board.
Instead of the normal announcements, a crowd could also be heard shouting “Heil Hitler” and “Sieg Heil” over the train’s speaker system.
The operator said there had been several such incidents in recent days.
One passenger on the Bregenz-Vienna service told media that everyone on the train was “completely shocked”.
David Stoegmueller, a Green Party MP, said the speech by the Nazi German leader was played over the intercom shortly before the train, an OEBB Railjet 661, arrived in Vienna.
“We heard two episodes,” he said. “First there was 30 seconds of a Hitler speech, and then I heard ‘Sieg Heil’.”
Stoegmueller said the train staff were unable to stop the recording and were unable to make their own announcements. “One crew member was really upset,” he added.
In a statement sent to media, Austrian Railways (OEBB) said: “We clearly distance ourselves from the content.
“We can currently assume that the announcements were made by people directly on the train via intercoms. We have reported the matter to the police,” the OEBB said.
It is understood that complaints have been filed against two people.
Stoegmueller said he had received an email from a man who was on the train with an old lady who was a concentration camp survivor. “She was crying,” he said.
He said another passenger remarked that when other countries had technical problems, it involved the air conditioning breaking down.
“In Austria, the technical problem is Hitler.”
Hitler was born in Austria and immigrated to Germany in 1913 as a young man.
The two are also suspected of being responsible for two other incidents last week on trains running from St Polten to Vienna, in which recordings were played over the train intercom. It was not clear if those recordings also had a Nazi connotation.
The national railway company OBB ruled out a cyber-attack on the train’s intercom system. Instead, the pair are believed to have opened the train conductors’ cabins with a key owned by the train company’s employees.
“They will have used the communication point in the usual manner, with a key, and then simply put a mobile phone next to it,” a spokesperson told Austrian newspaper Der Standard.
OBB said it was unclear how the suspects had obtained the key but ruled out that the charged individuals were themselves employed by the train company. At no point had the suspects obtained control over the train itself, the spokesperson said. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
