Jörg Haider; Politician Made Far-Right Party A Force in Austria

Mr. Haider had abandoned his earlier calls for Austria to withdraw from the European Union and had relaxed some of his views on immigration. But, in a Sept. 26 interview with the British newspaper the Independent, he showed a touch of his old defiance.

"We are not going to let the outside world dictate to Austria how it should deal with the past," he said.

Jörg Haider was born Jan. 26, 1950, in the Austrian town of Bad Goisern. His father had joined the Hitler Youth in 1929 and soon became a storm trooper in the Nazi armed forces. He participated in a failed takeover of the Austrian government in 1934, four years before Germany annexed Austria.

His mother was a member of the Nazi League of German Maidens.

The younger Mr. Haider was a graduate of the University of Vienna and received a law degree in 1973. As a young man, he practiced fencing with a straw dummy labeled with the name of Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna-based hunter of Nazi war criminals.

Mr. Haider repeatedly denied that he had any links to Nazism or anti-Semitism, but in 1991 he was forced to resign as governor of Carinthia after he praised the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler's "orderly employment program." (He was reelected in 1999.)

To great applause, Mr. Haider lauded a group of Waffen SS veterans at a 1995 reunion as "decent men of character who remained faithful to their ideals."

He was a prominent defender of Kurt Waldheim in the 1980s when the Austrian president and onetime secretary general of the United Nations was exposed as a former officer in the Nazi SS.

Mr. Haider had several Jewish associates in his party, but he often mocked Austria's Jewish leaders and accused his opponents of trying to appeal to interests on the U.S. "East Coast."

He spoke fluent English, often visited the United States and once ran in the New York City Marathon. He kept a U.S. flag and a California state flag in his office -- the latter in part because of California's early anti-immigration movement.

Mr. Haider lived on a 38,000-acre estate that provided a generous income from inherited forestlands. An uncle had bought the property at a bargain price after its Jewish owners were forced to flee in 1938.

Survivors include his wife, two daughters and his 90-year-old mother.