30 Years Ago: The Worst Attack in the History of the Second Republic

It is still the worst politically motivated attack in the history of the Second Republic—the attack on Romani people in Oberwart, Burgenland. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the murders.

On the night of 4 to 5 February 1995, four young men were killed by a pipe bomb. The explosive device was attached to a board with the racist message “Roma back to India”. It was constructed so that anyone who tried to remove the board with the hate speech would trigger the bomb’s detonator. Four men—Erwin Horvath, Karl Horvath, Peter Sarközi and Josef Simon—died at the site.

Footage from a news item by Walter Reiss/ORF Burgenland, 5.2.1995 Österreichischer Rundfunk ORF

On the evening after the attack, the ORF news programme “Zeit im Bild” broadcast an item on the history of Romani people in Oberwart. The grandfather of two of the victims spoke about how the violence reminded him of the traumatic experiences of Nazi persecution. 

In this ORF news item, broadcast on the day after the attack, Romani people spoke for the first time in the Austrian mass media about the attack, describing what had taken place in Oberwart. Here, a survivor of Nazi terror tells the TV news programme “Burgenland heute” that at one time, 350 Romani people lived in Oberwart, but only around two dozen of them survived the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. His entire family was murdered—after six years, he returned to Oberwart from the Mauthausen concentration camp. Fifty years later he is speaking openly about Nazi persecution—in light of this attack, which claimed the lives of two of this grandsons and the son of a fellow concentration camp survivor.

A few days later, the artist Karl Stojka, a Romani man, was a guest on the Ö1-Mittagsjournal radio programme. He expressed alarm at the attack and emphasised that Romani people have been Austrian citizens for centuries. For the last 50 years, everyone had got along with very few problems. He held neo-Nazis responsible for the attack on Romani people in Oberwart and described it as the “cowardly murder of innocent people”. He strongly criticised the authorities for dragging their feet over the investigation and the initial assumptions that Romani people themselves were behind the attack.

Here Stojka was referring to those people who, following the attack on Oberwart, treated Romani people with hostility or even blamed them for the attack. The populist right-wing politician Jörg Haider further fuelled these kinds of assumption.

It was another two-and-half years before the person behind the attack on Oberwart was identified—the Austrian far-right extremist Franz Fuchs, who had carried out several attacks (in particular involving letter bombs) from 1993 onwards.