>He openly praised Hitler's employment policies
and attended celebrations of ex-Waffen SS
members.
I saw this mentioned in a newspaper too and stopped to wonder what Hitler's employment policies he praised and how seriously. Europe is pretty openly enforcing Hitler's no-smoking policies except they don't credit Hitler for them, so one can wonder how much this is about linking Haider to Hitler and how much it is about working policies. I doubt the part he praised was "sack all Jews lol" or it'd have been quoted in the papers.
Also Waffen-SS (elite soldiers) =/= regular SS (concentration camp guards etc), not all Waffen-SS units committed war crimes and some, non-Germans particularly, were in the organization only to fight Stalin and communism.
I know next to nothing about Haider and Austrian politics, but I know about European media.
>Just for those of you who don't known him,
he's the reason why many people wanted to
exclude Austria from the European Union.
I kinda heard that the exclusion and no-handshaking campaign was initiated by the Austrian Social Democratic party AFTER Haider's party decided form a government without them. Perhaps his reputation as a budding holocauster is a bit exaggerated or the local democrats are the slimiest amoral fuckers alive for wanting into a government run by Führer II.