Obviously, if Gerstl is telling the truth, this devastates those on the left, and an unfortunate few of the more adamant and bitter McClintock supporters, who gleefully wish to tar Arnold as a Nazi sympathizer.
My only caveat is that this is all according to one guy who appears to like Arnold and probably has reason to feel defensive on Arnold's behalf as a fellow Austrian getting pounded with Nazi allegations. Grain of salt, therefore.
Same story appeared AUGUST 21, 2003 (supposedly).
Friends Say Arnold Has The Muscle
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian Friends Strongly Support His Bid for Governor, By Lisa Silverman
...people are asking whether Schwarzenegger’s background should be cause for concern in his current bid for California’s governorship.Not at all, is the answer from Alfred Gerstl, a close friend of Schwarzenegger who is still in frequent contact with the superstar. Gerstl insists that Schwarzenegger has always been and remains committed to the fight against anti-Semitism. "Arnold would be the best choice for this office," notes Gerstl, former president of the upper house of the Austrian Parliament known as the Bundesrat, and, since 1992, head of the Kameradschaft der politisch Verfolgten und Bekenner für Österreich (Club for the Politically Persecuted and Austrian Patriots), a group he helped found after World War II.
Gerstl knew Schwarzenegger when he was a teenager growing up outside Graz and often took the young Arnold to lectures by outspoken Austrian anti-fascists and members of the Kameradschaft. In the early 1960s, when a group of neo-Nazi students held a demonstration against these lectures, Gerstl organized a counter-demonstration and brought Arnold with him. According to Gerstl, this shows that Arnold was influenced by a strong anti-Nazi political sensibility from a very young age.
Alfred Gerstl was born on July 3, 1923, in Graz, to parents who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1920, in an attempt to overcome the difficulties the father was having advancing his career at the national railroad. However, it was because of Alfred Gerstl’s own anti-fascist political stance that the Nazis forced him to leave school in 1938...