Kurt Waldheim, Former UN Chief, 88
DGH
Kurt Waldheim, Former U.N. Chief, Is Dead at 88
By JONATHAN KANDELL [New York Times]
Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and
President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war
crimes was exposed late in his career, died today [June 14, 2007] at
his home in Vienna [Austria]. He was 88.
His death was announced by the office of the Austrian president, Heinz
Fischer, and by Mr. Waldheim's wife, Elisabeth. The cause was heart
failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported. Although it was never
proved that Mr. Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War
II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to German
military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and
civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between
1942 and 1944.
Mr. Waldheim concealed his wartime service in the Balkans, saying his
military career ended in 1942, after he was wounded on the Russian
front.
But more than four decades later, his assertions were controverted by
eyewitnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Mr.
Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres
and deportations.
"Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite, or personally commit
what is commonly called a war crime," wrote Prof. Robert Edwin
Herzstein of the University of South Carolina, a historian whose
archival research was crucial in uncovering Mr. Waldheim's Nazi past.
"But this non-guilt must not be confused with innocence. The fact that
Waldheim played a significant role in military units that
unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least
morally complicit in those crimes."
By early 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission listed him as
a suspected war criminal subject to trial. Yet no government pressed
to bring Mr. Waldheim to account or even to reveal his history.
A former Yugoslav intelligence official, Anton Kolendic, said he
informed his Soviet counterparts "in late 1947 or 1948" that his
government was seeking Mr. Waldheim on suspicion of involvement in war
crimes. But the Russians did nothing. And according to a bipartisan
letter from Congress sent to President Bill Clinton, the Central
Intelligence Agency was aware of Mr. Waldheim's wartime record years
before he stood for election as secretary general but chose to conceal
it.
Mr. Waldheim, who had reached the pinnacle of the Austrian foreign
ministry, went on to serve two terms as secretary general from 1972 to
1982.
It was not until he ran for president of Austria in 1986 that his
wartime past became widely known. During his campaign, political
opponents, investigative journalists, historians and the World Jewish
Congress uncovered archival evidence of Mr. Waldheim's involvement
with the Nazi movement as a student and his wartime role in the
Balkans.
But the revelations were met by a nationalist, anti-Semitic backlash
in Austria that aided Mr. Waldheim's election. Many Austrians
apparently viewed Mr. Waldheim's life as a parable of their own. They
identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to
view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and
forced into their military service. He became a soldier in Hitler's
army, Mr. Waldheim insisted, "just as hundreds of thousands of other
Austrians did their duty."
Kurt Waldheim was born on December 21, 1918, in St. Andrä-Wördern
[Austira], a village near Vienna. His father, Walter, the son of an
impoverished blacksmith, became the local school superintendent and
married a daughter of the mayor. Thanks to his parents' middle-class
standing, Kurt and his brother and sister endured few of the economic
deprivations that most Austrians did during the 1920's, when Austria
was a "defeated, ruined, truncated remnant of the former Austro-
Hungarian Habsburg Empire," Mr. Waldheim wrote in his 1985 memoir, "In
the Eye of the Storm."
In March 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered his army into Austria and annexed
the country in what became known as the Anschluss. Because of his anti-
Nazi sympathies, Walter Waldheim was twice arrested by the Gestapo and
lost his job. "Our family was under constant surveillance," Kurt
Waldheim wrote. "We lived in daily apprehension."
Mr. Waldheim asserted that he had never belonged to a Nazi-affiliated
group. But in fact, at 19, he had joined the National Socialist German
Students League, a Nazi youth organization, a month after the
Anschluss. Then, in November 1938, he enrolled in the Sturm-Abteilung,
or SA, the paramilitary Nazi organization of storm troopers known as
the Brownshirts.
Told in 1986 that documents existed that proved he had joined these
Nazi groups, Mr. Waldheim dismissed their significance, arguing that
they were meant to protect him and his family. He said in his memoir
that he had enlisted in the German army to ward off suspicion of his
anti-Nazi opinions.
"A civilian whose politics and activities were under scrutiny was
better off as a soldier," Mr. Waldheim wrote. "In the army, there was
much less harassment of those known to disapprove of Nazism, and I had
no further trouble."
In the war, Mr. Waldheim was assigned to the Russian front as a first
lieutenant. He suffered a severe ankle wound from a grenade fragment
in December 1941 and was sent back to Austria to recover. By his
account, his wound ended his military service in 1942, allowing him to
complete his law studies.
In fact, as soon as his ankle recovered sufficiently, he was sent back
into active service, this time as an intelligence officer in the
Balkans. He was assigned to the 714th Infantry Division under the
command of the notorious Gen. Friedrich Stahl, who led the Germans and
their Croatian allies in an operation that slaughtered more than
60,000 suspected Yugoslav partisans and their family members at
Kozara, in West Bosnia, in 1942.
Lieutenant Waldheim had a significant enough role in the massacre to
have had his name inscribed on a divisional roll of honor. The
Croatians awarded him the Silver Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir
"for courage in the battle against rebels in West Bosnia."
When hiswartime service in the Balkans was revealed in 1986, Mr.
Waldheim insisted at first that he had never been near Kozara. When
documents proved the contrary, he played down any involvement in the
massacre and told The Associated Press that the Zvonimir medal was
handed out "like chocolates" to all German officers.
Other documents disclosed that Mr. Waldheim had served as a staff
officer with a large military unit that executed thousands of
partisans and noncombatants in Montenegro and eastern Macedonia and
killed Allied commandos who had been taken prisoner.
Its commander, Gen. Alexander Löhr, was an Austrian who in 1947 was
put to death in Yugoslavia for war crimes.
Mr. Waldheim was also stationed in Greece just outside Salonika, where
more than 60,000 Jews were shipped off to Auschwitz. Only 10,000
survived.
"I never heard or learned anything of this while I was there," Mr.
Waldheim said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. But
according to Mr. Herzstein, the historian, Mr. Waldheim prepared
numerous reports on the deportations for his army superiors, including
General Löhr.
"It is hard to believe," Mr. Herzstein wrote in "Waldheim: The Missing
Years," a 1988 book on his investigations into the former Secretary
General's past, that "this ambitious young staff officer, whose
success had been based in large part on his ability to keep abreast of
what was going on, could have failed to notice that most of the Jewish
community of Salonika - nearly a third of the city's population - had
been shipped off to Auschwitz." He added, "As that officer, Kurt
Waldheim served as an efficient and effective cog in the machinery of
genocide."
On leave between his Balkan assignments, Mr. Waldheim managed to marry
Elisabeth Ritschel and complete his law degree thesis at the
University of Vienna in 1944. His wife, also a law student, was an
ardent Nazi who before the war had renounced her Roman Catholic faith
and joined the League of German Maidens, the female equivalent of the
Hitler Youth. She applied for Nazi party membership as soon as she was
old enough and was accepted in 1941.
The Waldheims had two daughters, Liselotte and Christa, and a son,
Gerhard, who became an active defender of his father when revelations
of his Nazi past surfaced in 1986.With the end of World War II, the
Allies designated Austria as a nation invaded by the Nazis rather than
Germany's willing partner. The country's new status helped assuage the
fears of thousands of Austrian combatants like Mr. Waldheim. Moreover,
Austria was named a neutral nation in the growing Cold War between
East and West.
In December 1945, Mr. Waldheim became a personal assistant to Karl
Gruber, who was soon appointed Austria's foreign minister. Mr.
Waldheim worked closely with Mr. Gruber on a bitter border dispute
with Yugoslavia, by then a Communist country under the leadership of
Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the partisans' wartime commander.
Mr. Waldheim's prominent role in the dispute almost proved his
undoing. In September 1947, the Yugoslav interior ministry discovered
that the young diplomat had been an intelligence officer in a German
army unit involved in atrocities against Yugoslav partisans. The next
year, the Yugoslavs had Mr. Waldheim's name added to the United
Nations War Crimes Commission list of suspected war criminals, a
procedure that often led to extradition and trial.
But Cold War events apparently conspired to save Mr. Waldheim.
Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and claimed a neutral position
between East and West. As part of their realignment, the Yugoslavs
agreed to drop their claims on Austrian territory and thus may have no
longer had any interest in extraditing Mr. Waldheim or even exposing
his past.
Both the Americans and the Russians were aware of Mr. Waldheim's
wartime record. Mr. Kolendic, the former Yugoslav intelligence
official, told The Times in 1986 that he had handed over to a senior
Soviet intelligence officer a list of "about 25 or 27" Austrians
sought for war crimes, including Mr. Waldheim.
It is unclear why American intelligence officials decided not to
expose Mr. Waldheim's wartime record early in his diplomatic career.
But the C.I.A.'s failure to do so aroused Congressional resentment.
"We now know that our government had in its possession information and
documents on Kurt Waldheim," a bipartisan group of 59 congressmen and
women wrote to President Clinton in 1998. "There is no more onerous
example of the harm these hidden files can cause than the fact that
Kurt Waldheim was elected Secretary-General of the United Nations
while the Central Intelligence Agency concealed his wartime past."
Mr. Waldheim became first secretary in Austria's embassy in Paris. By
1951, he was chief of the personnel division of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. Foreign Minister Gruber lost his post in 1954, but
Mr. Waldheim was already cultivating another mentor and rising star in
the Austrian government, Bruno Kreisky, a socialist and a Jew who had
survived the war in Sweden.
In 1955, Mr. Waldheim was named Austria's first permanent
representative to the United Nations. In 1968, with Mr. Kreisky
installed as Chancellor of Austria, Mr. Waldheim became his foreign
minister. Soon he traveled to Belgrade, where Marshal Tito bestowed on
him the Order of the Grand Cross of the Yugoslav Flag, to acknowledge
his efforts to improve relations between the two countries. Mr.
Waldheim was now in the singular position of having been decorated by
both the Fascist wartime authorities and the postwar Communist regime
in Yugoslavia.
Three years later, when U Thant stepped down as Secretary General, the
United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union backed Mr.
Waldheim for the post. He became Secretary General in 1972 and won
another five-year term in 1977.
Mr. Waldheim was criticized as being ineffective and too willing to
cave in to pressure. Western countries complained that he had failed
to pressure Vietnam to abandon its military occupation of Cambodia.
The United States and Israel said he was not being even-handed in the
Middle East. He endorsed Palestinian statehood without mentioning
Israel's right to exist, and when an Israeli commando unit staged its
dramatic rescue of hostages at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976, Mr.
Waldheim called the action "a serious violation of the national
sovereignty of a United Nations member state."
Mr. Waldheim retired from the U.N. after it became clear that he had
no support for his bid for a third term as Secretary General. He
returned to Austria and retired from the foreign ministry in 1984.
If Mr. Waldheim had stayed away from public office at this point, it
is likely that his Nazi past would have never been revealed. But in
1985, he embarked on a campaign for the largely ceremonial post of
President of Austria, running as the candidate of the rightwing
People's Party.
Rival Socialist politicians began to circulate stories about Mr.
Waldheim's Nazi past, and some archival material made its way into a
leading magazine, Profil. Its interest aroused, the World Jewish
Congress asked Mr. Herzstein, the scholar of Nazi history, to comb the
National Archives in Washington for evidence of Mr. Waldheim's
possible involvement in war crimes.
On March 4, 1986, a Times reporter, John Tagliabue, wrote an article
from Vienna on documentary evidence about Mr. Waldheim's wartime
service in the Balkans and his pre-war Nazi associations. And on March
25, the congress announced Mr. Herzstein's findings at a press
conference in New York.
The revelations set off a fierce debate in Austria. Socialists tried
to persuade voters that a Waldheim victory would stain Austria's
reputation abroad. But conservatives convinced much of the electorate
that the accusations against Mr. Waldheim were an intolerable
interference by foreigners in Austrian internal affairs. Campaign
posters reflected the backlash, asserting under images of Waldheim,
"Now More Than Ever." Hate mail threatened violence against Austrian
Jews if Mr. Waldheim lost.
On June 8, 1986, in a two-round election, Mr. Waldheim won the runoff
for Austria's presidency with 53.9 percent of the 4.7 million votes
cast. But the controversy over his past did not subside. On April 28,
1987 the Justice Department barred Mr. Waldheim from entering the
United States after determining that he had "assisted or participated
in" the deportation, mistreatment and execution of civilians and
Allied soldiers in World War II.
At Mr. Waldheim's request, the Austrian government appointed a
commission of historians from seven countries to investigate the
accusations. On Feb. 8, 1988, the panel said it had no evidence that
Mr. Waldheim was guilty of war crimes. But itconcluded that he had to
have been aware of the atrocities committed around him and had done
nothing about them, thereby facilitating them.
Mr. Waldheim maintained that he was guiltless. He never expressed
remorse or regret for his Balkan service or for his efforts to hide
it.
Mr. Waldheim did not seek a second six-year term when his presidency
ended in 1992. In a 1996 autobiography, "The Answer," he contended
that his banishment from the United States had resulted from a
conspiracy by American Jews, who he said had pressured the Republican
administration of President Ronald Reagan to send a "useful signal" to
Jewish voters in the 1988 presidential campaign.
Mr. Waldheim steadfastly portrayed himself as an ordinary citizen who
had been caught up in a maelstrom.
"Waldheim was clearly not a psycopath like Dr. Josef Mengele nor a
hate-filled racist like Adolf Hitler," Mr. Herzstein wrote. "His very
ordinariness, in fact, may be the most important thing about him. For
if history teaches us anything, it is that the Hitlers and the
Mengeles could never have accomplished their atrocious deeds by
themselves. It took hundreds of thousands of ordinary men - well-
meaning but ambitious men like Kurt Waldheim - to make the Third Reich
possible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/world/europe/14cnd-waldheim.html?hp
Stacia
>Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and
>President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war
>crimes was exposed late in his career, died today [June 14, 2007] at
>his home in Vienna [Austria].
Huh. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Can't believe he lived to
be 88 years old, though, that's all kinds of wrong.
>Three years later, when U Thant stepped down as Secretary General, the
>United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union backed Mr.
>Waldheim for the post.
If I read this article correctly, the US knew of Waldheim's past and
didn't care, and endorsed him anyway, until his past became public
knowledge. Only then did the US take any action. God, we suck. The US
sucks. A bunch of bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, the lot
of us.
>In a 1996 autobiography, "The Answer," he contended
>that his banishment from the United States had resulted from a
>conspiracy by American Jews
What a fucking scumbag.
Stacia
Matthew Kruk
news:f4tfo6$lut$1...@news.xmission.com...
> DGH <peri...@eudoramail.com> writes:
> ...
> If I read this article correctly, the US knew of Waldheim's past and
> didn't care, and endorsed him anyway, until his past became public
> knowledge. Only then did the US take any action. God, we suck. The US
> sucks. A bunch of bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, the lot
> of us.
>
>>In a 1996 autobiography, "The Answer," he contended
>>that his banishment from the United States had resulted from a
>>conspiracy by American Jews
>
> What a fucking scumbag.
Overall a very sad life Stacia. So much potential in the wrong direction.
William Bojanowski
sta...@xmission.com (Stacia) wrote:
> DGH <peri...@eudoramail.com> writes:
>
> >Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and
> >President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war
> >crimes was exposed late in his career, died today [June 14, 2007] at
> >his home in Vienna [Austria].
>
>
> If I read this article correctly, the US knew of Waldheim's past and
> didn't care, and endorsed him anyway, until his past became public
> knowledge. Only then did the US take any action. God, we suck. The US
> sucks. A bunch of bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, the lot
> of us.
>
>
> Stacia
More likely than not, the US and Soviets probably used what they knew
about Waldheim to get him to do their bidding when they felt it was in
their best interest.
Boj
MWB
> If I read this article correctly, the US knew of Waldheim's past and
> didn't care, and endorsed him anyway, until his past became public
> knowledge. Only then did the US take any action. God, we suck. The US
> sucks. A bunch of bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, the lot
> of us.
I won't bring up NASA.
Mark
Stacia
>On Fri, 15 Jun 2007 07:39:50 +0000 (UTC), sta...@xmission.com (Stacia)
>wrote:
>>A bunch of bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling
>What have I told you about unnecessary "Scrubs" references?
Au contraire, it's a *necessary* "Scrubs" reference. (I actually heard
it years before I watched a single episode of the show, if that's any
consolation.)
Stacia