Nazi Hunter (72 page)

Hartner, who worked with Waldheim until 1945 and was captured at the end of the war, said that, when the new officer first arrived in Arsakli in mid-1942, ‘he was not very popular owing to
his volatile, unrestrained, and somewhat haughty nature’, but ‘later on, he became more considerate and friendly. As to myself, he treated me in a very accommodating manner since I was
able to put calls through to his wife.’ If this implies opportunism, it is not as devastating as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s opinion of Waldheim’s secret of
subsequent success: ‘Of my meetings with him, I have retained the impression that this man is living proof of
the untruth of the dictum that nature abhors a vacuum. He
is vacuum itself. Neuter and neutral. The opposite of an exceptional human being. He was ideal for the job of UN Secretary General, where no intellectual initiative is required.’

It is safe to say that, returning to the Balkans with his doctoral dissertation nearly completed and the girl that he’d marry constantly in mind, the young Lieutenant Waldheim had every
incentive to stay alive and toe the line. Commuting between courtship in Vienna and combat zones on the fluctuating Balkan front, he had only to do ‘nothing but my duty as a soldier’ to
stay out of trouble in wartime. For this, no unexceptional human being can be faulted. The questions that remain are not just
What were Waldheim’s duties?
and
What were their
consequences?
, but also the familiar American question asked of presidents from Nixon to Bush, from Watergate to Enron:
How much did he know and when did he know it?

After reporting back to his base in Arsakli at the beginning of July 1943, First Lieutenant Waldheim was dispatched to Athens as one of three officers on the German general
staff working with the 11th Italian Army in the Greek capital. From 19 July to 21 August, one of his duties was to write the staff’s war diary. On 8 August, using his unit’s approved
terminology of referring to partisans as
bandits
, Waldheim noted:

Slave labour was needed to fuel Germany’s faltering war machine. Two days later, in Arsakli, General Löhr issued an order extending the net beyond the pool of
suspected partisans:

For weeks, the German Army’s 1st Mountain Division – operating
in the Pindus range of north-western Greece – had been seeking
authorization to deport the entire male civilian populations of areas in which it was conducting sweeps against partisans. Hitler’s order and Löhr’s expansion of it (both of which
were introduced at the postwar Nuremberg trials as evidence of wartime atrocities) hinted that the time might be at hand. On 15 August 1943, the Mountain Division radioed this message to
Athens:

The transmission was received and certified ‘correct’ by Lieutenant Waldheim, who then forwarded it to the chief of the German general staff in Athens, General Heinz von Gyldenfeldt.
In his reply, Gyldenfeldt told the 1st Mountain Division: ‘Concerning the rounding up of the male civilian population, clarity should have been created by the recent order’ of General
Löhr. In other words: Go
ahead and do it, hut don’t blame me
.

Waldheim’s ‘White Book’ argues with some merit and considerable acerbity that:

Or, as Simon Wiesenthal put it: ‘The war wouldn’t have stopped if
Waldheim had protested. His chair might be empty for ten minutes, but then
somebody else would be sitting in it.’

The German Army in Greece rode close herd on their balky Italian partners that summer as the Allies invaded Sicily on 10 July 1943. Mussolini was ousted and imprisoned two weeks later. His
successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, dissolved the Fascist Party and, on 3 September in Algiers, signed an armistice with the Allies. Five days later, it was revealed that Italy had surrendered
unconditionally. Freed by the Germans, Mussolini set up a fascist puppet government in northern Italy. Meanwhile, Badoglio’s Italy – joining the Allies as a ‘co-belligerent’
– declared war on Germany.

Overnight, unreliable partners became prisoners of war in Greece – and Waldheim, with his command of the Italian language, was a go-between when his immediate superior, Lt-Col. Bruno
Willers, met with his Italian counterpart to negotiate the surrender of the 11th Italian Army. After laying down their arms peaceably, the Italian troops waited, rather naïvely, for the
Germans to ship them home – ‘by way of Germany’, they were told. There, however, tens of thousands of Italian officers and enlisted men were interned in forced labour camps.

From July in Arsakli, when his liaison team was briefed by Löhr and Gyldenfeldt on what to do if Italy suddenly left the Axis, to the end of September, when the last of the 11th Army was
shipped north from Greece, Lieutenant Waldheim knew the score better than almost anybody else. Dr Hagen Fleischer, a history professor at the University of Crete who began investigating
Waldheim’s past the day he was named United Nations Secretary General in 1971, says he has ascertained that, after participating in the 11th Army’s surrender negotiations, Waldheim
‘personally interrogated Italian prisoners when the Germans, fearing the Italians would desert to . . . the underground resistance movement, embarked upon punitive operations.’ Colonel
Willers, however, insists to this day that Waldheim not only ‘wouldn’t have hurt a fly’, but didn’t have the authority to.

Upon his return to headquarters in Arsakli, above the city of Salonika, Waldheim became the third-ranking intelligence officer on General Löhr’s staff. This, said a
US Justice Department analysis in 1986, ‘was no mean feat for a young lieutenant.’ In a job that, at Army Group level, was held by captains or majors or even
lieutenant-colonels more often than by a reserve lieutenant, Waldheim had two other first lieutenants working under him.

Waldheim’s chief from late 1943 until the end of the war was another achiever: a thirty-year-old Silesian-born lieutenant-colonel named Herbert Warnstorff, who was twenty years younger
than his deputy, Major Wilhelm Hammer, a Prussian reserve officer and spa director who walked with a cane thanks to a World War I wound.

Colonel Warnstorff, a successful textile manufacturer after the war, surfaced in 1986 to support Waldheim’s claims that his lieutenant was a mere desk officer during their military months
together. Most of the time, said Warnstorff, he let Waldheim give the daily intelligence briefing to General Löhr, who seemed more comfortable with his fellow Austrian than with
Waldheim’s Prussian and Silesian superiors. It soon was clear to everybody present that the tall lieutenant was the General’s pet. Briefed by Warnstorff or Hammer, Löhr’s
first question would be, ‘Where’s Waldheim?’ Reminded that Waldheim had gone back to Austria in late 1943 for a five-week Christmas-and-study leave, Löhr remarked with fond
admiration: ‘That’s right. He’s always studying.’

Waldheim was, indeed, revising his dissertation as well as plighting his troth to Liselotte Ritschel in Vienna. Despite political differences, the clerical-fascist family Waldheim and the Nazi
family Ritschel warmed to each other and it was agreed that, if the war didn’t interfere, Kurt and Cissy would marry sometime in mid-1944. Immediately after 1943’s Christmas dinner at
the Waldheims in Baden, the fiancé returned to active duty in Arsakli.

There, in addition to briefing General Löhr and important visitors, his duties were to gather and summarize information on enemy movements. In this job, Waldheim was, in the words of the
University of Crete’s Professor Fleischer (whose field of history is the German occupation of Greece), ‘one of the best informed men in the German forces’ with knowledge of
‘virtually all aspects of the occupation of the Balkans’, though Fleischer himself is guilty of scholarly over-reach when he adds that ‘it is even probable that he personally
attended executions in Yugoslavia.’ With his access to wider information, Waldheim was also one of the first in a position to perceive that the war was lost.

University of South Carolina history professor (and World Jewish Congress researcher) Herzstein concurs that, by the end of 1943,
Waldheim ‘had become a major
intelligence figure in an Army Group of 300,000 men.’ Dr Herzstein went on to say: ‘In seventeen years of research in German bureaucratic records of that era, I have rarely come across
so much responsibility in the hands of so junior an officer.’ In early 1944, Lieutenant Waldheim won yet another medal: the German War Merit Cross, Second Class, with Swords, ‘awarded
for especially meritorious service in the zone of enemy action or for exceptional services in furthering the war effort.’

An Army Group E duty roster dated 1 December 1943 lists First Lieutenant Waldheim’s other responsibilities:

And ‘special missions’ – a catch-all euphemism which, in the Third Reich, could cover an unimaginable multitude of sins.

Waldheim denies that he ever interrogated a prisoner – insisting that, if anybody were to do such work, it would have been the job of Major Hammer, who was the counter-intelligence
officer. One of his assistants, as well as ex-Colonel Warnstorff, support his claim.

It should be said here that neither this book nor any of the many books about the Waldheim affair have come up with more than circumstantial evidence against Waldheim. Nor is it likely that any
future investigation will unearth a ‘smoking gun’ of the make so aptly described by Michael Graff – general secretary of the Austrian People’s Party, whose presidential
candidate Waldheim was in 1971 and 1986 – when he asserted in late 1987: ‘So long as it’s not proved he strangled six Jews with his own hands, no problem.’ Graff had to
resign for what Simon Wiesenthal protested as ‘an insult to the worth of every Jew’, but his cynical perception of what Waldheim’s friends feared and foes hoped to find was deadly
accurate.

The closest anyone has come to Graff’s prescription for hard evidence against his hero was when, in 1986, a survivor of the 1944 deportations of the 2000 Jews of the north-western Greek
city of Ioannina swore he had seen his brother beaten on 24 March by a
German officer he now identified as Kurt Waldheim; three other Ioannina deportees then came forth to
testify that Lieutenant Waldheim had beaten them with a baton the next day in Larissa, where they were transferred from trucks to a train bound for Auschwitz. But Waldheim’s military records
show that, on 23 February 1944, due to thyroid trouble that had been diagnosed in January, he was granted a medical leave to go back to Austria. On 1 March, he entered the Military Treatment Centre
in the mountain spa of Semmering, fifty miles from his family’s home in Baden-bei-Wien, and was not released until 29 March.

While in Semmering, Waldheim put the finishing touches on his doctoral dissertation, which his fiancée – visiting him whenever she could free herself from her law classes in Vienna,
sixty-five miles away – typed on a portable typewriter in a room at the nearby Hotel Panhans. Waldheim submitted his ninety-four-page thesis on Konstantin Frantz during his medical leave and,
almost immediately, received a telegram from his professor: ‘
DISSERTATION ACCEPTED. CONGRATULATIONS. VERDROSS
’. It led to another extension of Waldheim’s
leave – this time to receive his Doctor of Laws degree on Friday, 14 April 1944, at the University of Vienna, where his signature shows he accepted it personally. On the same day, his
fiancée rejoined the Catholic Church. Two days later, Dr Kurt Waldheim returned to Arsakli.

His subsequent activities bear scrutiny, for the most formidable accusations lodged against him charge him with ‘murder’ and ‘putting hostages to death’
between April 1944 and May 1945. Astonishingly, these charges were contained in United Nations War Crimes Commission file number 79/724, a seven-page document which lay buried in the archives of UN
headquarters in New York from 1948 to 1986, including the decade when Waldheim was at the helm of the world organization.

On 21 April 1944, right after Waldheim rejoined the intelligence command at Arsakli, Major Hammer issued a message estimating the number of Jews and foreigners on the Greek island of Corfu and
ordering the Corps Group Ioannina to register them. On 28 April, the intelligence section of the Corps Group sent a letter to the intelligence command in Arsakli asking that the Nazi SD (Security
Service) and Gestapo ‘bring about implementation
measures . . . for the purpose of settlement of the Jewish question’ by ‘evacuating’ some 2000 Jews
living on Corfu. On 12 May, General Löhr agreed to ‘furnish transportation for an accelerated evacuation of the Jews.’ On 17 June, the SS reported that 1795 Jews on Corfu had been
‘seized and transported from the island’ to Auschwitz, where most of them died.