The Verbotsgesetz 1947 (Prohibition Act 1947), abbreviated VerbotsG, is an Austrian constitutional law originally passed on 8 May 1945 (Victory in Europe Day) and amended multiple times, most significantly in February 1947 and in 1992. It banned the Nazi Party and its subsidiaries and required former party members to register with local authorities. Individuals were also subject to criminal sanctions and banned from employment in positions of power. In later decades, the law's provisions against propaganda came to be used against neo-Nazism with a focus on Holocaust denial as well as the deliberate belittlement of any Nazi atrocities. Because the law does not explicitly mention these categories, there was considerable disagreement between regional courts, leading to the 1992 amendment resolving those doubts. Provisions According to Article I VerbotsG, the Nazi Party, its paramilitary organisations such as SS, SA, the National Socialist Motor Corps and National Socialist Flyers Corps, as well as all affiliated associations were dissolved and banned. To underpin the prohibition, the itself, though constitutional law, comprises several penal provisions classifying any act of (re-)engagement in National Socialist activities () as a punishable offense. Section 3 h VerbotsG included in 1992 states that shall be punished with imprisonment for one year up to ten years, in the case of special perilousness of the offender or the engagement up to twenty years. All cases are to be tried by jury. The Austrian legal scholar and judge Wilhelm Malaniuk justified the admissibility of the non-application of the principle with regard to the : "Because these are criminal acts that violate the laws of humanity so grossly that such lawbreakers are not entitled to the guarantee function of the offense." Denazification and the Amnesties of 1947 and 1957 The 1945 law required all Austrian members of the Nazi Party or their subsidiaries such as the (SA) and (SS) to register, forced their dismissal from administrative positions and certain high-level positions in the private sector, and barred them from gaining such employment. They were also ineligible to stand in the election of 1945. Fines could be levied based on assessments of individual involvement with the Nazi regime. These efforts of denazification did not last long. With the public mood shifting from considering Austria as a perpetrator of Nazi aggression to one of its victims, calls to end the endless process of almost two years of self-reflection grew louder. French and American opposition managed