massacres. Kreisky attacking Wiesenthal Kreisky supported Peter and said that Wiesenthal was a crypto-racist who himself was responsible for antisemitism in Austria. On a party conference, his secretary Leopold Gratz claimed that Wiesenthal was operating a "secret police and surveillance center" and was in no way allowed to defame democratically elected politicians. Kreisky later on said that Wiesenthal "makes a living telling the world that Austria is anti-Semitic. What else can he do?" He went on to call Wiesenthal a former Gestapo agent, based on Czechoslovakian intelligence papers which turned out to be fakes years later and he wanted a parliamentary investigation of Wiesenthal's Jewish Documentary Center in Vienna. He claimed that Wiesenthal was employing mafia methods. Austria's two most famous living Jews were therefore publicly at odds about Austria's Nazi past, supporting Israel, and postwar Jewish identity in Austria. The row climaxed in an unsubstantiated allegation that Kreisky had claimed that he "was no longer Jewish," to which Wiesenthal's response was that "the only Austrian who does not believe Kreisky is Jewish is Kreisky himself." In an interview with a Dutch journalist, the chancellor even stated that "the Jews are no people, and if they are they're a lousy people." Kreisky and Heinz Fischer, later president of Austria from 2004 to 2016, even considered a parliamentary inquiry on Wiesenthal and his center. Before the Austrian presidential elections in 2002, Fischer publicly apologized for his behavior in that context. Legal action Initially, Wiesenthal sued the chancellor for slander, but he dropped the case when Kreisky was persuaded by his party colleagues to drop at least part of his allegations, because it did damage to his image abroad. A lead article in the weekly news magazine Profil assessed Kreisky's behavior towards Wiesenthal as immoral and undignified. The author was sued by the Chancellor and found guilty of defamation by Austrian courts; in 1986, the European Court of Human Rights, however, decided unanimously in favor of the journalist for reasons of freedom of speech. The same year Kreisky renewed his allegations that Wiesenthal was a Gestapo collaborator, three years after leaving office and therefore no longer protected by parliamentary immunity. Wiesenthal himself sued again and the former Chancellor was found guilty of defamation and had to pay a fine of 270,000 ATS (US$25,000). Background Unlike Wiesenthal, who had spent years in Nazi concentration camps and had lost most of his family there,