Austria’s FPO Party likes to portray itself as a conservative, populist party that sits in the political mainstream.  But for the third time this year, a party official was caught flaunting Nazi sympathies. 

This time, the spokesman of the Vienna branch of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs has been fired for posting Nazi battle hymns onto his Facebook page: Specifically, excerpts from a battle song of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS units.

The story was published in the Austrian news weekly magazine Falter.  Former FPÖ spokesman Stefan Gotschacher has since restricted public access to his Facebook page. 

Expressing pro-Nazi sentiments is illegal in Austria.

In February, Austrian police opened an investigation into the FPÖ’s Fabian Wetter for posting a photo-montage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel displaying a Star of David and calling her a "traitor to her fatherland".

The other official, Michael Linder, posted photos of him wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a neo-Nazi heavy metal group and a citation from a poem popular with the Hitler Youth.