Kurt Waldheim was Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 and President of Austria from 1986 to 1992. He had concealed, throughout three decades of senior international diplomatic life, that he had served from 1942 to 1944 as a Wehrmacht intelligence officer in the Balkans, attached to units that conducted reprisal killings of civilians and the deportations of Jews from Greece. The concealment was exposed in March 1986, midway through his Austrian presidential campaign. The international scandal that followed, the Waldheim Affair, was a turning point in Austrian and international understanding of the country’s wartime past. Waldheim was elected anyway, served his single term, and was for the duration of it a persona non grata in most of the Western world.
The official biography that he had told
Waldheim’s official autobiography, published before his UN candidacy, stated that he had been wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941, had returned home to Austria, and had spent the rest of the war as a law student at the University of Vienna. The story was repeated in his public speeches, his diplomatic biographical entries, and his political campaign materials in Austria. It was the basis on which he had become Austrian Foreign Minister in 1968 and UN Secretary-General in 1972.
The story was false. Waldheim had recovered from his Eastern Front wound and returned to active duty in spring 1942. He was assigned as a German liaison officer to the Italian Eleventh Army in Greece and, after Italy’s exit from the war in September 1943, to Army Group E in Yugoslavia and Greece. He held the rank of Oberleutnant. He served continuously in the Balkans until early 1945. Documentary evidence of his service, including his own signed reports, photographs of him at unit headquarters, and the Wehrmacht personnel files, surfaced in 1986.
Army Group E and what it did
Army Group E, under General Alexander Löhr, conducted some of the most brutal anti-partisan operations of the war. Reprisal ratios of 100 civilians killed for every German soldier killed by partisans were standard policy. The villages of Distomo, Kalavryta and Kommeno in Greece were destroyed and their populations massacred under Army Group E orders. Waldheim served at Army Group E headquarters in Arsakli, Greece, in the intelligence section O3. His specific role was the analysis of partisan activity and the preparation of operational summaries for the army group commander. The operational summaries he drafted, some of them in his own handwriting, recommended specific reprisal operations.
The Greek Jewish deportations
The deportations of the Greek Jewish communities of Salonika in 1943 and the Jews of the Aegean islands of Rhodes and Kos in 1944 were conducted under the operational authority of Army Group E. The trains and ships used to deport the Jews of Salonika to Auschwitz, around 46,000 people, ran on schedules drawn up by the army group’s rail liaison office. The deportation of the 2,000 Jews of Rhodes and Kos in summer 1944 was conducted by an army group operation under direct Wehrmacht command. The Salonika and Rhodes deportations are documented in Army Group E’s own files. Waldheim’s name appears on routing memoranda relating to the operations.
Waldheim’s own postwar position was that he had been a junior officer who had not been involved in policy decisions and had not personally seen any killings. The 1986 international historians’ commission, established by the Austrian government and chaired by Hans Rudolf Kurz, concluded that Waldheim had known about the war crimes and the Jewish deportations conducted under Army Group E’s authority, that he had been close enough to several specific operations to have personal knowledge of them, but that the available evidence did not support a personal criminal charge of having ordered or directly participated in killings. The commission found his postwar denial of knowledge to be untrue.
The 1986 campaign
The Waldheim past surfaced during the 1986 Austrian presidential campaign through investigative reporting by the Austrian newsmagazine Profil, the World Jewish Congress in New York, and the journalist Hubertus Czernin. The campaign reaction in Austria was defensive: Waldheim accused his accusers of orchestrating an international conspiracy to interfere in Austrian politics, and his vote share rose. He was elected on 8 June 1986 with 53.9 per cent of the vote. The Austrian electorate had voted for him knowing what had been published. The vote was reasonably interpreted at the time as an Austrian rejection of international scrutiny of the country’s wartime past.
The international response
The United States placed Waldheim on the Justice Department’s watch list of persons banned from entering the country on 27 April 1987. He was the first sitting head of state of an allied country to be so banned. Most Western European governments cancelled or downgraded their diplomatic representation at his presidential events. He completed his single six-year term in international isolation. The Austrian government chose not to nominate him for a second term.
What it changed in Austria
The Waldheim Affair forced the Austrian state, for the first time, to confront its own wartime past. The official Austrian position from 1945 to 1986 had been the so-called victim doctrine, that Austria had been the first victim of Nazi aggression in the 1938 Anschluss and bore no collective responsibility for what had followed. The doctrine had been politically convenient, but it had been historically false. Austria had supplied a disproportionate share of the German occupation personnel in the Balkans, the camp staff at Mauthausen and at the killing camps, and senior figures in the SS including Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner, Globocnik and Seyss-Inquart. The Waldheim Affair made the victim doctrine untenable. The first formal Austrian acknowledgment of co-responsibility came in Chancellor Franz Vranitzky’s parliamentary speech of 8 July 1991. Austria’s reckoning with its own past begins from there.
What he was
Waldheim was the case of the long-concealed past that broke through after thirty years. He had been a junior intelligence officer in a Wehrmacht command that had run massacres and Jewish deportations. He had concealed the service. He had risen to two of the most prestigious offices in international and Austrian public life on the basis of the concealment. The 1986 exposure was a delayed accounting that came too late for his career to be ended by it. The wider Austrian accounting that followed has lasted longer than his presidency.
See also
Sources
- Robert E. Herzstein, Waldheim: The Missing Years, Arbor House, 1988
- Eli Rosenbaum, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, St Martin’s, 1993
- International Commission of Historians, the Kurz Commission, report of 1988
- US Justice Department Office of Special Investigations: report on Kurt Waldheim, 1987
- USHMM: Kurt Waldheim