The Great Eiernockerl Hoax, or: Six Degrees of Adolf Hitler

Ordering Egg Dumplings Today Might Get You Blacklisted, Censured, or Fired, that is, at least in Austria, because it's 20 April (Hitler's birthday)

Well, we all need a break from the more serious stuff, don’t we? (/sarcasm)

EDIT: for a German-language version, please venture over to tkp.at.

Legend has it that none other than Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) liked to eat what Austrians lovingly call ‘Eiernockerl’, that is (according to Wikipedia, references omitted),

Eiernockerl (German for "egg dumplings") is a simple and popular dish of the Viennese cuisine…

Typical ingredients for Eiernockerl are flour, eggs, milk, butter, and then salt, pepper, ground nutmeg, and for decoration chives [whoever is the moron who wrote this, chives is for additional taste]. Eiernockerl is usually served with a side dish of green salad.

It’s a very wonderful dish, easy home-made pasta, which my kids love, sometimes with egg, sometimes baked in the oven with grated cheese (pro tip: a mixture of mountain cheese, of Bergkäse, and sour cheese, or Sauerkäse, from Vorarlberg), to which, if so desired, with fried onion rings (white onions would be my choice).

It’s eaten all over Austria, there are, of course, variations in Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian cuisine, as well as in Bavaria (but they use blue, or mouldy, cheese and add jam, which isn’t too bad but not my personal preference).

Back to the origins of this posting (from Wikipedia, same source as above, references omitted; my emphases):

Alleged tie to Hitler

In 1997, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Holocaust denier and former district council member for the Freedom Party, alleged that Adolf Hitler’s favorite food was Eiernockerl. Some restaurants in Austria started advertising the dish as a ‘daily special’ for the 20th of April, which is Hitler’s date of birth. Accordingly, many neofascists have taken to celebrate Hitler's birthday by eating Eiernockerl while they promote the ostensibly strictly culinary event on social media.

The allegation about the dish has not been historically confirmed, though Hitler was fond of Leberknödel (liver dumplings), and Eiernockerl is normally served in Austrian restaurants every day of the year.

So, a since-deceased, former local politician by the name of Wolfgang Fröhlich once, in 1997, alleged that Hitler liked Eiernockerl (more about Mr. Fröhlich’s Holocaust denialism can be found here). Even though Wikipedia also admits that there is no evidence for this food-crime (if that’s a word), there is a lot of inanities in one paragraph:

Fröhlich is stylised as a ‘Holocaust denier’ (a crime in Austria and 13 other European countries) and ‘former district council member for the Freedom Party’ whose origins hark back to the immediate post-WW2 era and gave many Austrians who were barred from voting in 1945 due to Allied-imposed ‘denazification’ policies a political home. The Freedom Party also has another liberal wing—in US parlance that would be more akin to ‘socially liberal, economically (neo)liberal—that held sway until the ascent of Jörg Haider (1950-2008; no time to dive into his bio right now, but see here) in 1986, which brought the nationalist-corporatist Burschenschaft (as in student-associations) wing to power. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

It is further stated that ‘some restaurants in Austria started advertising the dish as a “daily special”’ on 20 April, which would be hilarious if it wouldn’t be totally stupid. Remember, Eiernockerl are a staple dish in virtually every Austrian restaurant offering ‘traditional’ cuisine and often included in lunch deals.

Finally, there is also the seemingly ‘natural’ insinuation that, ‘accordingly, many neofascists have taken to celebrate Hitler's birthday by eating Eiernockerl’, sometimes posting their dishes to social media. That is, doing something almost every tourist or visitor does when eating some ‘local specialty’.

To summarise the six degrees of Adolf Hitler here:

1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

2. Nazi Party, Germany, defeated in 1945

3. Austrian Prohibition Act (Verbotsgesetz) of 1947, amended in 1992 to include ‘Holocaust Denialism’ (Holocaust-Leugnung)

4. in 1997, Wolfgang Fröhlich (1952-2021) alleged Hitler liked to eat Eiernockerl

5. in 2005, Fröhlich is sentenced for the first time for infraction of the Prohibition Act; in total, he received 14 years in prison (do see this compilation for background)

6. Today, everyone who advertises, eats, or even posts pictures of said dish is tantamount to an outlaw

Of course, extraordinary claims such as no. 6 require extraordinary proof. Hence, I shall present you with the following:

As introduced by tabloid Heute (source) on this very day, 20 April 2023, we learn (my translation, emphases mine):

Hitler’s Birthday: Anyone Offering Eiernockerl Today Will be Fired [that is, from a Facebook group]

Eiernockerl with green salad were considered Adolf Hitler’s favourite dish. A Facebook group with a connections to the hospitality industry is now making a statement.

On 20 April, Eiernockerl with green salad are frowned upon. The reason: Adolf Hitler’s birthday. There have been repeated complaints in this context in the past.

Police Officer Sentenced

Heute reported on the case of a policeman from Burgenland (presumed to be innocent) who allegedly posted a picture with Eiernockerl and therefore had to go to court [see below].

‘No more posting will be tolerated from this inn’

In the run-up to Hitler's birthday today, the administrator of the Facebook group ‘Menu plans, daily menus and offers for Sankt Pölten & surroundings’ (the group has approx. 2,700 members) now also sent a message: ‘Dear everyone here! To make one thing clear again, because the ominous date is coming up again soon, and as of today the FPÖ is in the state government. Here in this group, Eiernockerl on 20 April as the menu of the day still means exclusion from this group and no posting from this inn will be tolerated here any more. No discussion! Thank you for taking note’, said the administrator. [that would, of course, mean that no mentioning of the origin story of this hoax would be permitted, which means facts, evidence—rather: the lack thereof—would be admissible: is this (still) ‘hearsay’?]

Popular Main Course in Austria

According to a survey from 2010, Eiernockerl are among the ten most popular main courses among Austrians [no source given, but, of course they are, because all Austrians are closet Nazis by eating, every now and then, a traditional dish whose origins predate Hitler’s birth; makes total sense]

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Now, we could simply laugh about this silly exercise in virtue-signalling (that also displays considerable contempt for the results of this spring’s elections in Lower Austria), but the real-world implications are both grotesquely absurd and very real.

About two years, on 10 April 2021, above-mentioned tabloid Heute ran this short piece (again, my translation, emphases):

Hitler Posting? Police Officer in Court for Eiernockerl

The officer allegedly posted Adolf Hitler’s alleged favourite dish on Facebook on [Hitler’s] birthday. Is this a violation of the Prohibition Act? [do two allegations make one fact?]

A tasteless posting on Facebook has brought repercussions for a police officer and former Freedom Party politician. The officer will have to answer for a crime against the Prohibition Act in Eisenstadt on Monday. [oh, wait, it’s no longer an allegation, it’s a fact already—prior to the officer’s day in court]

He allegedly posted a photo of the dictator’s alleged favourite dish on Facebook on 20 April 2020, Adolf Hitler’s birthday. According to the indictment, he wrote: ‘Lunch today! Eiernockerl with green salad!’ [back to two allegations, then]

Suspension and Expulsion from the Freedom Party

After the posting, the man was expelled from the FPÖ and temporarily suspended from the party. In the meantime, he has resumed his duties as a police officer, according to the Austrian Press Agency [well, of course, because of the stipulation ‘guilty until proven innocent’ (you may review the second paragraph above here)]. The state police command of Burgenland now wants to wait for the verdict. Then the police’s disciplinary commission will decide on possible further steps. [well, I sure hope so, for otherwise we’d be talking about ‘food crime’ here]

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Implications

If at-first you (and certainly I) thought that this anecdote would be too stupid to bother, well, here’s why it’s important:

First, government authorities (ahem) are taking this seriously. Why? I don’t know, but it’s important to consider the ‘evidence’ before us (such as it exists): someone posts ‘food porn’ on social media, adding something potentially innocuous (‘Lunch today! Eiernockerl with green salad!’), yet for whatever reason, state attorneys deem this worthy of their time and the taxpayers’ money to investigate. Good luck establishing intent, by the way, because…

…as we’ve learned, second, there’s absolutely zero, zilch, nada evidence—as in: historical records proving, beyond reasonable doubt—that Adolf Hitler counted Eiernockerl among his favourite dishes. Granted, there’s also no evidence to the contrary, yet I’m convinced that the Austrian judiciary will figure out what used to be a simple proverb (‘absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence’); I therefore move to commission a historical enquiry into ‘Nazi Cuisine’ or ‘Hitler’s Chefs’ (/sarcasm).

Third, let’s not forget the chronology of the Prohibition Act of 1947 and its amendments that were promulgated in 1992 to include ‘Holocaust denial’ (Holocaust-Leugnung) as a criminal offence. I suppose it’s fair to assume, for the sake of the argument, that Eiernockerl were part of the Austrian cuisine well before Hitler came of age, the Prohibition Act, and the latter’s amendments. Hence, we may establish, however tentatively, that prosecuting anyone for posting a photograph of said dish of Eiernockerl—’even’ on 20 April or any other day of the year—is, to be frank, a supremely stupid idea, to say nothing about wasteful spending of taxpayer money. Now, it may or may not be that the police officer entertained pro-Nazi sympathies, and it would certainly be in the public interest to find out about this—but serious questions about the initial suspicion about the intent of both local police and the public prosecutor’s office that elected to press charges remain.

I’d add that these are very valid concerns, esp. given the bad optics this entire charade entails, but they also beg two important considerations:

1. given the ‘logic’ implied here, anyone who expresses any opinion, widely understood, may be subject to persecution by the authorities because something, which may once have been perfectly innocuous, has been retroactively considered illegal. Now, there are legitimate cases where this is a sound proposition, such as, e.g., the medicinal use of heroin in Fin de siècle treatments, but I’d argue that this is a qualitatively different issue quite removed from posting ‘food porn’ and the tricky issue of establishing intent.

2. on a more general plane, if the above-synthesised logic is applied as a legal principle, we may then move to pick any more or less random word and/or example from the past, declare it offensive and illegal irrespective of its past meaning and/or present contexts, and lock up people indefinitely with or without charges, due process, and the like.

Would you care for an example or two? What about the term ‘crusade’? Oh, wait, in it’s Islamic context (‘jihad’), we’ve done exactly that twenty years ago (here’s looking at you, US gov’t and your black hole a.k.a. Guantanamo Bay).

Huhum, shall we try another one? What about ‘publishing leaked material’? Oh, wait, shall we bring up Julian Assange who’s been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy for 7 years, was spied upon by US ‘intelligence’ services incl. the conversations he had with his lawyers, before he was apprehended by British police (thereby forcibly violating—’invading’—what is technically and legally Ecuadorian territory), put on a sham trial in London for a crime he didn’t commit (remember: there was no Swedish extradition request as Swedish police never opened a formal investigation, in addition to a judge being needed to sign off on both the opening of such an investigation and, more importantly, the extradition request), did his time (in Belmarsh extra-max prison), and is kept there for by now 3+ years without any additional charges, having been sentenced, or anything else—other than the ‘crime’ of exposing war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq:

(Note that Youtube considers the content of the ‘Collateral Murder’ video ‘offensive’ and might ‘cause harm to some’; please watch it, if needs be.)

Bottom Lines

Let’s briefly recapitulate: if German-language legacy media hails the ‘heroism’ of the Ukrainian Azov formations, which consist, in part, of Neonazi and right-wing extremist elements, that’s ‘standing with Ukraine’. I’ve documented this to the best of my abilities here on Substack (e.g., here, here, and here).

As I’ve explored in detail over at Propaganda in Focus, the home front is, so far, still a wee bit different. We still perform #neveragain, but at this point in time, I suppose that serious questions are in order as to the credibility of this stance, to say nothing about the abuse of the criminal justice system this entails.

Don’t get me wrong, I recoil at National Socialism and its spawn, Neonazism, that is staring right back at the collective West, which has been gazing into the abyss way too long.

Drunk on hypocrisy and without regard for facts, contradictory messaging, and the ‘collateral damage’ such a stance entails, we’re merrily trundling along.

Yet, the road we’re walking on isn’t leading us to redemption; to the contrary, it is increasingly hard, if not impossible, to consider that this road is leading us anywhere—that is, except straight to hell, including a pavement of corpses in various stages of putrefaction.

And that stench reeks to high heavens by now.