jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
- Messages
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The death of Kurt Waldheim was reported today and this obituary which appeared in today's New York Times is quite interesting, particularly focusing on his service in World War II and how it affected his post WW II life.
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Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes were exposed late in his career, died yesterday at his home in Vienna. He was 88.
His death was announced by his wife, Elisabeth, and the office of the Austrian president, Heinz Fischer. The cause was heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported.
It was never proved that Mr. Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II. But 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 contradicted by witnesses, 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 disclose 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 history 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, from 1972 to 1982.
In Race for President, The Secret Comes Out
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 Dec. 21, 1918, in St. Andrä-Wördern, 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 economic deprivations during the 1920s, when Austria was a “defeated, ruined, truncated remnant of the former Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg 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. 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 joined the National Socialist German Students League, a Nazi youth organization. Then, in November 1938, he enrolled in the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the paramilitary Nazi organization of storm troopers known as the Brownshirts.
Told in 1986 that documents 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 returned to active service, 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 western Bosnia, in 1942.
Lieutenant Waldheim had a significant enough role in the operation to have 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 his wartime service in the Balkans was disclosed 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 showed 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 was put to death in Yugoslavia in 1947 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 1986 in an interview with The New York Times. But according to Professor Herzstein, the historian, Mr. Waldheim prepared numerous reports on the deportations for his superiors, including General Löhr.
“It is hard to believe,” Mr. Herzstein wrote in “Waldheim: The Missing Years,” a 1988 book on his investigations, 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 young women’s 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. They, along with their mother, survive Mr. Waldheim.
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 remained neutral in the growing cold war between East and West.
A Political Career Begins In a Postwar Calm
In December 1945, Mr. Waldheim became a personal assistant to Karl Gruber, who was soon appointed 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 Tito, the Partisans’ wartime commander.
Mr. Waldheim was almost undone by his role in the dispute. In September 1947, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry discovered that he had been an intelligence officer in a German Army unit involved in atrocities against the 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.
(continued in next thread)
*****
Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes were exposed late in his career, died yesterday at his home in Vienna. He was 88.
His death was announced by his wife, Elisabeth, and the office of the Austrian president, Heinz Fischer. The cause was heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported.
It was never proved that Mr. Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II. But 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 contradicted by witnesses, 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 disclose 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 history 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, from 1972 to 1982.
In Race for President, The Secret Comes Out
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 Dec. 21, 1918, in St. Andrä-Wördern, 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 economic deprivations during the 1920s, when Austria was a “defeated, ruined, truncated remnant of the former Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg 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. 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 joined the National Socialist German Students League, a Nazi youth organization. Then, in November 1938, he enrolled in the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the paramilitary Nazi organization of storm troopers known as the Brownshirts.
Told in 1986 that documents 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 returned to active service, 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 western Bosnia, in 1942.
Lieutenant Waldheim had a significant enough role in the operation to have 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 his wartime service in the Balkans was disclosed 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 showed 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 was put to death in Yugoslavia in 1947 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 1986 in an interview with The New York Times. But according to Professor Herzstein, the historian, Mr. Waldheim prepared numerous reports on the deportations for his superiors, including General Löhr.
“It is hard to believe,” Mr. Herzstein wrote in “Waldheim: The Missing Years,” a 1988 book on his investigations, 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 young women’s 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. They, along with their mother, survive Mr. Waldheim.
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 remained neutral in the growing cold war between East and West.
A Political Career Begins In a Postwar Calm
In December 1945, Mr. Waldheim became a personal assistant to Karl Gruber, who was soon appointed 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 Tito, the Partisans’ wartime commander.
Mr. Waldheim was almost undone by his role in the dispute. In September 1947, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry discovered that he had been an intelligence officer in a German Army unit involved in atrocities against the 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.
(continued in next thread)
