Kurt Waldheim

Early life and education

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. Three weeks after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, 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.

Military service in World War II

In early 1941, Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht and posted to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad leader. In December of that year, he was wounded but he returned to service in 1942. His service in the Wehrmacht from 1942 to 1945 was the subject of international review in 1985 and 1986. In his 1985 autobiography, he stated that he was discharged from further service at the front and, for the remainder of the war, finished his law degree at the University of Vienna, in addition to marrying in 1944. After publication, documents and witnesses came to light that revealed Waldheim’s military service continued until 1945, during which time he rose to the rank of Oberleutnant.

Service in Yugoslavia and Greece

Waldheim's functions within the staff of German Army Group E from 1942 until 1945, as determined by the International Commission of Historians, were:

By 1943, Waldheim was serving in the capacity of an aide-de-camp 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 local Serb civilians 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 meters (yards) of Waldheim's office, and just 35 kilometres (22 mi) 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 Nazi puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia, awarded Waldheim the Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir in silver with an oak branches cluster. Decades later, during the lobbying for his election as U.N. Secretary General, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, who had led anti-German forces during the war, 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."

Surrender

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.

Diplomatic career

Waldheim joined the Austrian diplomatic service in 1945, after finishing his studies in law at the University of Vienna. He served as First Secretary of the Legation in Paris from 1948, and in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Vienna from 1951 to 1956. In 1956 he was made Ambassador to Canada, returning to the Ministry in 1960, after which he became the Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations in 1964. For two years beginning in 1968, he was the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs in Austria serving for the Austrian People's Party, before going back as Permanent Representative to the U.N. in 1970. Shortly afterwards, he ran and was defeated in the 1971 Austrian presidential elections.

United Nations Secretary-General

After being defeated in his home country's presidential election, he was appointed 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 Third 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 U.S. 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." Amidst 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."

After Operation Entebbe on 7 July 1976 — where Israeli commandos freed more than 100 Israeli and Jewish passengers held captive in Entebbe Airport (Uganda's main airport) by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and German Revolutionary Cells fighters protected by forces of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, and where all the hijackers, three hostages and 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed — Waldheim described the raid as a "serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state".

Waldheim was appointed again 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 organized a series of concerts for the People of Kampuchea to help Cambodia recover from the damage done by Pol Pot.

In 1981, Waldheim ran for an unprecedented third term as Secretary-General. He had been vetoed by China in 1971 and 1976, but was selected as Secretary-General after China changed its vetoes to abstentions. However, in 1981 China was determined to unseat Waldheim and vetoed him a record 16 times, forcing him to withdraw. He was succeeded by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru.

Election and Waldheim Affair

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.

Waldheim had previously claimed to have received a medical discharge after being wounded in winter 1942. His aides at the United Nations even accused the Israeli mission of spreading rumors that he supported the Nazis. However, Israeli ambassador Yehuda Zvi Blum said, "We don't believe Waldheim ever supported the Nazis and we never said he did. We have many differences with him, but that isn't one of them."

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 Thessaloniki, Greece, from 1942 to 1943 based on 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 leading Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, were Austrians, and Austria became part of the Third Reich.) Austria refused to pay compensation to Nazi victims, and from 1970 onwards 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.

According to several of Waldheim's obituarists, his wartime past and the discrepancies in his autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, must have been known to both superpowers before he was elected UN Secretary General, and there were rumours that the KGB had blackmailed him during his UN time (for example here and 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 because many of his revelations have not been sourced or otherwise confirmed, leading several critics to say that most of his work (including TOSOD) is fictional. Ostrovsky's service in Mossad was confirmed when the Israeli government unsuccessfully attempted to stop publication of the book.

Allegations of Nazi war crimes

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 Waldheim was stationed 5 miles (8.0 km) from Thessaloniki while, over the course of several weeks, the Jewish community, which formed one-third of the population there, was sent to Auschwitz:

I could only reply what the committee of historians likewise made clear in its report: 'I cannot believe you.'

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 that he could not stop what was going on in Yugoslavia and Greece even if he knew:

In favour of Waldheim is, that he only had very minor possibilities to act against the injustices happening. Actions against these, depending on which level the resistance occurred, were of very different importance. For a young member of the staff, who did not have any military authority on the army group level, the practical possibilities for resistance were very limited and with a high probability would not have led to any actual results. Resistance would have been limited to a formal protest or on the refusal to serve any longer in the army, which would have seemed to be a courageous act, however would have not led to any practical achievement.

Foreign visits

Throughout his term as President (1986–1992), Kurt Waldheim and his wife Elisabeth were officially deemed personae non gratae by the United States.

Later years and death

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 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. Japan and Syria were the only two countries that laid wreaths on his grave. Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, issued a message 'voicing sadness'. 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.