A couple of years ago, after a German language class, I spoke to the young teacher about Austria's Nazi past. It's something many young Austrians are more than willing to talk about.

But this time was different. The girl began crying. She explained her grandfather had recently died and told me how much she had loved him. But she knew he had served in the war, and because he never spoke of it, she wondered if he had been responsible for any of those terrible things.

I didn't know what to say.

Joerg Haider would have known what to say, and he regularly gets himself branded as a Nazi-sympathiser for saying it.

Nazi-sympathiser

He consistently pays tribute to the Austrian veterans of the Wehrmacht, including the Waffen SS. He says they became reformed after the war and helped to build Austria into the seventh richest nation in the world.

He's probably right about the majority, but Haider knows his accolade is also falling on some who committed dark crimes.

Haider is associated with Hitler in news reports

But for every veteran, there is a family of voters to whom they are simply beloved relatives. His is the one voice that untangles the awkward loving bonds of family that reach into the hatred of Austria's dark Nazi past.

Haider is undoubtedly an opportunist. He's been accused of raising baseless fears and setting himself up as the man to solve them.

An opportunist

In this election he ran a campaign of stopping immigration in a country that has virtually no immigration. He says he stands for a crackdown on crime in a country that has just about the lowest crime rate in the world.

It's against this background that a few of his comments have been taken as proof that he's an admirer of the Nazis. Two have been the most damaging.

He described the National Socialists' employment policies as sound and he used the word penal camp to describe a concentration camp.

Both quotes are used in nearly every newspaper story that associates Haider with Hitler.

When I asked him why he described penal camps as concentration camps, he refused to answer and took me to task for not having read the speech first.

The quote is factual, but the context in which he used it defies the charges that he was trying to play down the Holocaust - because he used the words to draw attention to the Holocaust.

Misunderstood

In the Austrian National Council he complained that the Romany people in Austria were being marginalised, and asked people to remember that they were almost exterminated in the penal camps of National Socialism.

Many ask why, if Haider complains of being misunderstood, he doesn't unequivocally condemn Hitler and National Socialism. But he has described the Third Reich as a heinous criminal regime.

More pointedly, he has said that Austria was as responsible as Germany for the seven terrible years of the war.

From a conversation I had with a foreign editor from a leading European paper, these comments are wasted.

Long running stories

Immediately after an interview with Haider he told me he thought he was a moderate. But he didn't expect his paper would be reporting this because the combination of Austria's Nazi past and Haider was too good a running story to spoil.

Haider says his reputation has been unjustly tainted, but it at least gives him a sense of freedom. But I've seen that many Austrians must be suffering under the influence of the long running stories of Nazi Austria.

A young journalist friend told me of an exchange visit to a Brisbane high school, when she was 19. In a discussion about anti-Semitism, she started to talk about its rise in 13th century Europe, but the teacher interrupted her, saying: 'Anyone who comes from Austria is blind to the subject.'

And I was on one of Vienna's pristine buses, when one of the passengers asked a British football fan to take his feet off the seat.

"You're all Nazis. We beat you in the war," he screamed at them.

In a caf_n Durnstein I heard one American tourist whisper to another: "There are a lot of Nazis here you know."

And a visiting producer, making a documentary about an Austrian alleged war criminal observed: "They all look like Nazis."