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VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Austrian historians are challenging California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican National Convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and that he left a "Socialist" country when he moved away in 1968.
Recalling that the Soviets once occupied part of Austria in the aftermath of World War II, Schwarzenegger told the convention on Tuesday: "I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes."
Historians, however, are questioning Schwarzenegger's version of postwar history -- if not his enduring popularity among Austrians who admire him for rising from a penniless immigrant to the highest official in America's most populous state.
"It's a fact -- as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria," the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighboring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.
The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.
Margita Thompson, spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger, defended Schwarzenegger's speech.
"Never in there did the governor reference that the tanks were where he grew up. It was a reference to visiting Soviet-occupied Austria," she said.
In his convention address, Schwarzenegger also said: "As a kid, I saw the Socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left" in 1955 and Austria regained its independence.
But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice rector of Graz University, told Kurier that Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People's Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, all the nation's chancellors were conservatives -- not Socialists.
What's more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative government headed by People's Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists and the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.
Schwarzenegger "confuses a free country with a Socialist one," said Polaschek, referring to East European Communist officials' routine descriptions of their countries as Socialist.
Thompson said the governor was "talking about a socialistic-style of government and governing that he experienced when living in Austria."
Polaschek saw the moderate Republican governor's recollections at the convention as a tactical move. Schwarzenegger, he said, was "using the old Communist enemy image for Bush's election campaign."
"He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician," Polaschek said.
Norbert Darabos, a ranking official of Austria's opposition Social Democratic Party, sharply criticized Schwarzenegger's "disdain for his former homeland."
"The Terminator is constructing a rather bizarre Austria image," he said.
But many ordinary Austrians seemed to be in a forgiving mood Friday over the gaffes.
"Maybe he has a wrong recollection -- it's so many years since he left," said Wilma Fadrany, 32, a Vienna waitress.
"There must be political reasons for such comments," she said. "You've got to tell the (convention delegates) what they want to hear in order to win them around. Politicians always talk the way it fits into their agenda."