VIENNA: So far Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most publicized family ties have been his marriage to a Kennedy, but his bid to become governor of California has thrown the spotlight onto his father’s Nazi past.

The late Gustav Shwarzenegger, a small-town policeman, applied to become a member of Hitler’s National Socialist Party in 1938 and enlisted into the German army on April 28, 1939, according to documents held at the state archives in Vienna and Berlin.

His war record shows that he joined the military police and took part in the invasions of Poland and France before serving on the Russian front during the siege of Leningrad in September 1941.

In February 1944, Schwarzenegger senior successfully applied to be discharged from the army, stating that he had been wounded and was suffering from malaria.

US media have made much of his Nazi party membership and military career, which ended three years before his famous son was born, since the Republican actor announced his decision to run against Democratic Governor Gray Davis.

But in Austria, a country that took 50 years to admit colluding with the Nazis, it has not rated a mention in press reports celebrating Schwarzenegger’s candidacy and his Austrian roots.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, which urges the persecution of Nazi war criminals, said this week that the Terminator actor had in 1990 asked it to probe his father’s past.

“He said that they never spoke about it at home, and were not taught about the Holocaust at school in Austria,” said Rabbi Mervyn Hier, the founder of the centre and a friend of Schwarzenegger.

“His father was an early Nazi. He asked to become a member before the Anschluss” when Hitler’s troops occupied Austria on March 11, 1938, he added.

Hier said the centre found Schwarzenegger’s party application form from 1938 and a document confirming membership, dated January 1941, in the German archives that were held in Washington before being returned to Berlin after the unification of Germany.

His military records only became declassified 30 years after his death in 1972.—AFP