VIENNA — In July 1990, following news reports that his father was a Nazi, movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger approached his friends at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and asked that they find the truth.
" 'I don't know much about my father's past,' " Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center, recalled Schwarzenegger's telling him. " 'I don't know if it's good or bad, and I'd like you to find out.' "
Asking the Wiesenthal Center to handle the investigation was a logical choice: The center, named after the famed Nazi hunter, had the resources to conduct such a probe. And it was an institution that Schwarzenegger had financially backed over the years.
After a two-month investigation, in which Simon Wiesenthal was involved, the verdict was in: Gustav Schwarzenegger was indeed a member of the Nazi party; he voluntarily applied for membership in 1938. But there was no evidence that he was a war criminal. Nor had the Wiesenthal Center found any evidence that the senior Schwarzenegger belonged to any of Germany's notorious paramilitary units, such as the Sturmabteilungen (SA) or the Schutzstaffel (SS), which were populated by some of Adolf Hitler's most ardent supporters.
But documents in the Austrian State Archives in Vienna, reviewed by The Times this week, show that Gustav Schwarzenegger had a deeper involvement in Hitler's regime than the Wiesenthal Center had uncovered. Hier said the documents were unavailable to the center's researchers when they investigated the matter.
One document in particular shows that Gustav Schwarzenegger was indeed a member of the Sturmabteilungen, also known as the "storm troopers" or "brownshirts." He joined the SA on May 1, 1939, according to the entry in the archive file -- about six months after the storm troopers helped launch Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked across Germany and Austria and thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps.
The records contain no other information about his activities with the SA. And, with the exception of Kristallnacht, the force had lost its position of dominance to the SS as far back as 1934. Without further documentation, it is difficult to draw conclusions about what Gustav Schwarzenegger did with the SA, said Ursula Schwarz, a researcher with the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance. At the same time, she noted, one had to apply to join the SA, unlike, say, the German army, which Austrian males were required to join after their country was annexed in 1938.
