Gustav Gottfried Schwarzenegger (1August 190713December 1972) was an Austrian police chief (), postal inspector, member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), and military police officer. He was the father of former governor of California and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Biography
Schwarzenegger was born on 1 August 1907 in Mürzzuschlag, the son of Karl Schwarzenegger (1872–1927) and wife Cecelia (née , 1878–1968). His paternal grandfather, Wenzel (Václav) Mach, was Czech, and came from the small village of Chocov near Mladá Vožice, in the Kingdom of Bohemia in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown of the Austrian Empire. Vaclav had a child out of wedlock with Kunigunde Schwarzenegger, and the child was originally named Carl Mach, but later adopted his mother's surname, Schwarzenegger.
Nazi Party and SA membership
According to documents obtained in 2003 from the Austrian State Archives by the Los Angeles Times, Schwarzenegger applied to join the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing, on 1March 1939. Austria became part of Nazi Germany after being annexed on 12March 1938. (sergeant major) of the , which acted as military police units. He served in Poland, France, Belgium, Ukraine, Lithuania and the Soviet Union. His unit was 521 (mot.), part of Panzer Group 4.
Wounded in action in the Siege of Leningrad, in Leningrad, Russia, on 22 August 1942, Schwarzenegger was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Classes for bravery, the Eastern Medal, and the Wound Badge Black/3rd Class; he also received significant medical attention for his injuries. Initially treated at a military hospital in , the capital of the General Government, according to the records, Schwarzenegger also suffered recurring bouts of malaria, which led to his discharge in February 1944. and that no evidence has emerged directly linking him with participation in war crimes or abuses against civilians.
Schwarzenegger died of a stroke on 13 December 1972, at the age of 65, in Austria, where he had been transferred as a policeman. While visiting Cemetery in August 1998, where her husband was buried, Aurelia Jadrny Schwarzenegger died of a heart attack at the age of 76; she is buried next to him. Their son, Arnold, stated in the film Pumping Iron that he did not attend his father's funeral, but the film's director, George Butler, later said that it was a story Arnold had appropriated from a boxer, to make it appear as though he could prevent his personal life from interfering with his athletic training.
News reports about Schwarzenegger's Nazi links first surfaced in 1990, at which time Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization he had long supported, to research his father's past. The Center found his father's army records and Nazi party membership, but did not uncover any connection to war crimes or the paramilitary organization, the (SS). Media interest resurfaced when Arnold ran for Governor of California in the state's 2003 recall election.
In his 2012 memoir, Arnold puts forth an account in which Gustav disapproved of him and viewed his weight training as "garbage".
In a 2021 video made in response to the January 6 United States Capitol attack, his son Arnold publicly recalled, how Gustav was frequently drunk and abusive to his family when Arnold was young. He attributed this behavior to guilt and shame over what Gustav and other Nazis and collaborators had perpetrated or enabled during the war. His son brought up the war's impact on Gustav again in a 2022 video about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which he urged the Russian soldiers to discontinue their invasion in order not to "be broken like [his] father".
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sv:Arnold Schwarzenegger#Biografi