Austria city to rename Porsche street over founder’s Nazi past

The Austrian city of Linz says it plans to rename a street honoring the founder of the luxury carmaker Porsche after a commission probing controversial names found his Nazi past “problematic.”

The renaming of streets and other public places is still a hotly debated issue in Austria — Adolf Hitler’s birthplace — which Nazi Germany annexed in 1938 and which long cast itself as a victim.

Only in the past three decades has the country begun to seriously examine its role in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of about a third of Austria’s Jewish population of 200,000.

The Porscheweg and three other streets are to be renamed in Linz, just under 200 kilometers (120 miles) west of Vienna, a city spokeswoman tells AFP.

The city senate is expected to approve the renaming this month, she adds. No new names have been fixed as yet for the streets.

“[Ferdinand] Porsche played a central role in the NS (National Socialism) war economy and actively promoted the forced labor of prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates,” the city says in a statement, announcing the commission’s findings.

In doing so, Porsche “accepted their deaths and the deaths of their children due to the inhumane conditions in the camps,” it adds.

Porsche did not immediately reply to an AFP request for comment.