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Kurt Josef Waldheim (21 December 1918 - 14 June 2007) was an Austrian diplomat and politician. Waldheim was the fourth Secretary General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and the ninth President of Austria, from 1986 to 1992. While he was running for President in Austria in 1985, his service as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II raised international controversy. Waldheim was born in Sankt Andrä - Wördern, a village near Vienna, on 21 December 1918. His father was a Roman Catholic school inspector of Czech origin named Watzlawick (original Czech spelling Václavík) who changed his name that year as the Habsburg monarchy collapsed. Waldheim served in the Austrian Army (1936-37) and attended the Vienna Consular Academy, where he graduated in 1939. Waldheim's father was active in the Christian Social Party. Waldheim himself was politically unaffiliated during these years at the Academy. Shortly after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, a 20 year old Waldheim applied for membership in the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB), a division of the Nazi Party. Shortly thereafter he became a registered member of the mounted corps of the SA. On 19 August 1944, he married Elisabeth Ritschel in Vienna; their first daughter, Lieselotte, was born the following year. A son, Gerhard, and another daughter, Christa, followed.
In early 1941 Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht
and sent to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad
leader. In December 1941 he was wounded but later returned
to service. His further service in the Wehrmacht
from 1942 to 1945 was subject of the international dispute
in 1985 and 1986. In 1985, in his autobiography, he stated
that he was discharged from further service at the front
and for the rest of the war years finished his law degree
at the University of Vienna in addition to marrying in
1944.
Documents and witnesses which have since come to light
reveal that Waldheim’s military service continued until
1945, and that he rose to the rank of Oberleutnant,
and confirmed that he married in 1944 and graduated with a
law degree from the University of Vienna in 1945. His functions within the staff of German Army Group E from 1942 until 1945, as determined by the International Commission of Historians, were:
By 1943 he was serving in the capacity of an ordnance officer in Army Group E which was headed by General Alexander Löhr. In 1986, Waldheim said that he had served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals against Serb civilians locally or of massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia. He said that he had known about some of the things that had happened and had been horrified, but could not see what else he could have done. Much historical interest has centered on Waldheim's role in Operation Kozara in 1942. According to one post war investigator, prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred yards of Waldheim's office, and just 35 km away at the Jasenovac concentration camp. Waldheim later stated "that he did not know about the murder of civilians there." Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmacht's "honor list" of those responsible for the militarily successful operation. The Independent State of Croatia awarded Waldheim the Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir in silver with an oak branches cluster. Later, during the lobbying for his election as U.N. Secretary General, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito awarded Waldheim one of the highest Yugoslav orders. Waldheim denied that he knew war crimes were taking place in Bosnia at the height of the battles between the Nazis and Tito's partisans in 1943. According to Eli Rosenbaum, in 1944, Waldheim reviewed and approved a packet of anti - Semitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Soviet lines, one of which ended, "enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over."
In 1945, Waldheim surrendered to British forces in
Carinthia, at which point he said he had fled his command
post within Army Group E, where he was serving with
General Löhr, who was seeking a special deal with the
British. After being defeated in his home country's presidential election, he was elected to succeed U Thant as United Nations Secretary General the same year. As Secretary General, Waldheim opened and addressed a number of major international conferences convened under United Nations auspices. These included the third session of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (Santiago, April 1972), the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, June 1972), the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (Caracas, June 1974), the World Population Conference (Bucharest, August 1974) and the World Food Conference (Rome, November 1974). However, his diplomatic efforts particularly in the Middle East were overshadowed by the diplomacy of then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. On 11 September 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin sent a telegram to Waldheim, copies of which went to Yasser Arafat and Golda Meir. In the telegram, Amin "applauded the massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich and said Germany was the most appropriate locale for this because it was where Hitler burned more than six million Jews." Amin also called "to expel Israel from the United Nations and to send all the Israelis to Britain, which bore the guilt for creating the Jewish state." Among international protest "the UN spokesman said [in his daily press conference] it was not the Secretary General's practice to comment on telegrams sent him by heads of government. He added that the Secretary General condemned any form of racial discrimination and genocide." Waldheim was re-elected in 1976 despite some opposition.
Waldheim and then U.S. President Jimmy Carter both
prepared written statements for inclusion on the Voyager
Golden Records, now in deep space. He was the first
Secretary General to visit North Korea, in 1979. In 1980,
Waldheim flew to Iran in an attempt to negotiate the
release of the American hostages held in Tehran, but Ayatollah Khomeini refused to
see him. While in Tehran,
it was announced that an attempt on Waldheim's life had
been foiled. Near the end of his tenure as Secretary
General, Waldheim and Paul McCartney also organized a
series of concerts for the People of Kampuchea to help
Cambodia recover from the damage done by Pol Pot.
The People's Republic of China vetoed Waldheim's
candidature for a third term, and he was succeeded by
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru. Waldheim had unsuccessfully sought election as President of Austria in 1971, but his second attempt on 8 June 1986 proved successful. During his campaign for the presidency in 1985, the events started that marked the beginning of what became known internationally as the "Waldheim Affair". Before the presidential elections, investigative journalist Alfred Worm revealed in the Austrian weekly news magazine Profil that there had been several omissions about Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945 in his recently published autobiography. A short time later, the World Jewish Congress alleged that Waldheim had lied about his service as an officer in the mounted corps of the SA, and his time as an ordnance officer for Army Group E in Saloniki, Greece, from 1942 to 1943 based in files from the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Waldheim called the allegations "pure lies and malicious acts". Nevertheless he admitted that he had known about German reprisals against partisans: "Yes, I knew. I was horrified. But what could I do? I had either to continue to serve or be executed." He said that he had never fired a shot or even seen a partisan. His former immediate superior at the time stated that Waldheim had "remained confined to a desk". Former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky, of Jewish origin, denounced the actions of the World Jewish Congress as an "extraordinary infamy" adding that Austrians would not "allow the Jews abroad to ... tell us who should be our President." Part of the reason for the controversy was Austria's refusal to address its national role in the Holocaust (many including Adolf Hitler were Austrians and Austria became part of the Third Reich). Austria refused to pay compensation to Nazi victims and from 1970 onward refused to investigate Austrian citizens who were senior Nazis. Stolen Jewish art remained public property until after the Waldheim affair. Because the revelations leading to the Waldheim affair came shortly before the presidential election, there has been speculation about the background of the affair. Declassified CIA documents show that the CIA had been aware of his wartime past since 1945. Information about Waldheim's wartime past was also previously published by a pro-German Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Volksblatt, during the 1971 presidential election campaign, including the claim of an SS membership, but the matter was supposedly regarded as unimportant or even advantageous for the candidate at that time. It has been asserted that his wartime past and the discrepancies in his biography, In the Eye of the Storm, must have been well known to both superpowers before he was elected UN Secretary General, and there were rumors that the KGB had blackmailed him during his UN time. A long article in The Washington Post (30 October 1986) on the question of possible Soviet blackmail is quoted at length here. In 1994, former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky claimed
in his book The Other Side of Deception that
Mossad doctored the file of the then UN Secretary General
to implicate him in Nazi crimes. These allegedly false
documents were subsequently "discovered" by Benjamin
Netanyahu in the UN file and triggered the "Waldheim
Affair". Ostrovsky says it was motivated by Waldheim's
criticism of Israel's war in Lebanon. Controversy
surrounds Ostrovsky and his writings and some of his
claims are disputed. Many of them have not been verified
from other sources, nor have they been refuted, and
critics such as Benny Morris and author David Wise have
charged that the book is essentially a novel. Ostrovsky
was credited as being a Mossad case officer by the Israeli
government through failed, possibly inept, attempts in the
Canadian and the U.S. courts to stop the publication of
his book. In view of the ongoing international controversy, the Austrian government decided to appoint an international committee of historians to examine Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945. Their report found no evidence of any personal involvement in those crimes. Although Waldheim had stated that he was unaware of any crimes taking place, the committee cited evidence that Waldheim must have known about war crimes. In response to Waldheim's denial that he knew about war crimes, Simon Wiesenthal stated that since Waldheim was stationed 5 miles (8.0 km) from Salonika while, over the course of several weeks, the Jewish community which formed one third of the population there, was sent to Auschwitz:
Wiesenthal stated the committee found no evidence that Waldheim took part in any war crimes but was guilty of lying about his military record. The International Committee in February 1988 concluded with that he could not stop what was going on in Yugoslavia and Greece even if he knew: Throughout his term as President (1986 - 1992), Kurt Waldheim and his wife Elisabeth were officially deemed personae non gratae by the United States. In 1987, they were put on a watch list of persons banned from entering the United States and remained on the list even after the publication of the International Committee of Historians' report on his military past in the Wehrmacht. After his term ended in 1992, Waldheim did not seek re-election. The same year, he was made an honorary member of K.H.V. Welfia Klosterneuburg, a Roman Catholic student fraternity a part of the Austrian Cartellverband. In 1994, Pope John Paul II awarded Waldheim a knighthood in the Order of Pius IX and his wife a papal honor. He died on 14 June 2007, from heart failure. On 23 June, his funeral was held at St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna, and he was buried at the Presidential Vault in the Zentralfriedhof ("central cemetery"). In his speech at the Cathedral, Federal President Heinz Fischer called Waldheim "a great Austrian" who had been wrongfully accused of having committed war crimes. Fischer also praised Waldheim for his efforts to solve international crises and for his contributions to world peace. At Waldheim's own request, no foreign heads of states or governments were invited to attend his funeral except Hans - Adam II, the Prince of Liechtenstein. Also present was Luis Durnwalder, governor of the Italian province of South Tyrol. Syria and Japan were the only two countries that laid a wreath. In a two page letter, published posthumously by the Austrian Press Agency the day after he died, Waldheim admitted making "mistakes" ("but these were certainly not those of a follower let alone an accomplice of a criminal regime") and asked his critics for forgiveness. |