Recalling Arnold's youth

GRAZ, Austria -- In a gym plastered with photographs of his protege, Arnold Schwarzenegger's former trainer described Saturday how the California gubernatorial candidate helped break up neo-Nazi gatherings as a teenager.

Trainer Kurt Marnul told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview that Schwarzenegger was "filled with rage against the Nazi regime" and took part at least twice in organized disruptions of neo-Nazi gatherings in the southern Austrian city of Graz during the 1960s.

Marnul said he would send Schwarzenegger and his other young weightlifters to use their menacing brawn to intimidate neo-Nazis into leaving.

Like many in and around Schwarzenegger's nearby hometown of Thal, Marnul remembered him as a quiet boy obsessed with weightlifting and expressed disbelief that the action star professed admiration for Adolf Hitler, as news accounts in the United States allege.

"It's absurd. It's 100 percent wrong that he could have ever liked Hitler," Marnul said, sitting on a bench in his gym, a dark basement filled with aging weightlifting equipment where Schwarzenegger began training at age 15.

Marnul, 74, recounted seeing Nazi soldiers kill three people at a concentration camp, two of them Jews and one a child, and how that motivated him to break up neo-Nazi rallies later in life.

He told AP he described his experiences to Schwarzenegger, who was about 17 at the time, and said the young bodybuilder reacted with shock and anger. He said Schwarzenegger, whose late father served as a volunteer with Hitler's brown-shirted storm troops, said such horrors were never discussed at home.

"He was so outraged -- so filled with rage against the Nazi regime," Marnul said. "The stories really tore him up."

Marnul's account came as Schwarzenegger, the front-runner in Tuesday's California recall election, struggled to counter allegations that he once expressed admiration for Hitler's rise to power from humble beginnings.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican who became a U.S. citizen in 1984, has said he did not recall making such a remark and called the Nazi leader a "disgusting villain."

In the village of Thal, residents remembered Schwarzenegger as the reserved son of strict parents who went swimming in the lake with other kids.

But he also spent a lot of time doing push-ups and chin-ups in the woods, said Karl Kling, 48, who grew up down the street from the Schwarzenegger family and now owns a restaurant.

Many here expressed affection for Schwarzenegger, who they say remains down-to-earth and still visits his childhood friends despite his Hollywood success.

They're angered by claims that the actor groped women on movie sets and elsewhere, calling them vicious attempts to ruin Schwarzenegger politically.

"It's the women who should be accused of sexual misconduct against him," Kling said. "Who wouldn't be happy to be touched by such a superstar?"

Kling also dismissed the notion that Schwarzenegger might have admired Hitler. In the postwar years, he said, no one in Thal even spoke about what happened in the Hitler era.

"If anyone had praised Hitler, they would have been locked away," Kling said.

Another childhood friend of Schwarzenegger, 56-year-old Franz Hoermann, also told AP that the Nazi past was never broached.

"I was in the Schwarzenegger home every day," Hoermann said. "And I never heard any comment about Hitler -- either for or against him."

On Friday, the Austrian magazine NU, which caters to the alpine nation's Jewish community, quoted former politician Alfred Gerstl as describing how Schwarzenegger once "hunted down" neo-Nazis who had gathered outside a teaching institute run by an avowed anti-fascist.

Marnul, the ex-trainer, confirmed that Gerstl often asked him to send his weightlifters to break up Nazi rallies.

Today, the walls of Marnul's gym attest to his long-lasting friendship with Schwarzenegger, with pictures of the two together over the past 40 years. One from 1987 carries a dedication from the Hollywood star: "Without you I never would have begun bodybuilding."

Back then, Marnul said, Schwarzenegger was a "very reserved boy" whose "only interest was in shaping his body in hopes of one day becoming Mr. Universe."

As for his early behavior with the opposite sex, Marnul said the teenage Schwarzenegger "had more or less no interest in women ... I think he would have liked to carry his weights to bed with him back then."