In 1975, their re-election was quite unsure, so Kreisky secretly struck a deal with the then liberal centrist Freedom Party's leader Friedrich Peter on building a government together if the socialists failed to achieve an absolute majority of seats in the National Council.
Kreisky, a Jew who had been persecuted by the Gestapo because of his political beliefs and Jewish birth,[1] and after that spent all of World War II in Sweden, formed his minority government after a close victory in the 1970 election.
Kreisky publicly defended his appointments, claiming that because of his own past as refugee and political prisoner, he could very well forgive former Nazis if they were democrats now.
"[2] In 1975, Wiesenthal showed his report to President Rudolf Kirchschläger, who urged him not to publish it before the election, because the Austrian people would see this as a foreign interference in their democracy.
[3] At a party conference, his secretary Leopold Gratz claimed that Wiesenthal was operating a "secret police and surveillance center"[4] and was in no way allowed to defame democratically elected politicians.
[6] A lead article in the weekly news magazine Profil assessed Kreisky's behavior towards Wiesenthal as immoral and undignified.
[8][9] Unlike Wiesenthal, who had spent years in Nazi concentration camps and had lost most of his family there, Kreisky felt that he had never personally suffered as a Jew, but only as a socialist.
Historians believe that Kreisky's forgiveness and relaxed attitude towards former Nazis dates from his time in the Austrian prisons during the Engelbert Dollfuss regime in 1935.
Historian Tom Segev described the affair as triggered by both men's complex personalities: "Vienna was too small a city to hold two Jews with egos of this size, both of whom wished to be part of Austrian society".