Nazi Hunter (75 page)

Molden was in his office when the tall young applicant with the game leg poked his head in and asked where the Personnel Office was. They chatted briefly before Waldheim headed down the hall.
Having been one of the first twelve postwar candidates to sit for the stiff competitive examination of the newly reconstituted Austrian Foreign Service – and one of only four to pass –
Waldheim already owned a certain star status when he walked in. Molden looked on approvingly, for Waldheim’s degrees in law and diplomacy, his foreign languages (English, French, Italian,
and, he acknowledged, a smattering of Serbo-Croatian), and the deferential manner in which he clothed his ambition all marked him as a man to watch.

Thus, it came as no surprise to Molden when, a few hours later, Gruber informed him that he was considering Waldheim to be his personal diplomatic secretary. Molden agreed with Gruber that
Waldheim’s credentials were impressive, even though both resistance fighters recognized him as, in Molden’s words, ‘a man who is not a hero, not the type of guy who goes into the
underground.’ Gruber asked Molden to investigate Waldheim’s past, for he was determined to have no Nazis, communists, or other security risks in any sensitive position in the
Ministry.

Molden checked out Waldheim with the Minister of Interior, an old Socialist named Oskar Helmer, as well as with the American CIC and OSS, and came back with not just a
clean bill of health, but statements from Nazi files in Lower Austria about the young man’s negative attitude toward Hitlerism. ‘Both CIC and OSS,’ Molden recalls, ‘said
“Go ahead. As far as we know, this man was never a Nazi.’”

On the personnel form that Waldheim submitted on 3 November 1945, he answered the section on military service by filling in the blanks for
duration
with ‘15 Aug. 1939 to 9 May
1945’. . .
campaigns
: ‘France, Russia, Balkans’ . . . and
injuries
: ‘large splinter in right lower leg’. Six boxes later, when asked about
membership in military clubs, alliances, associations of the Nazi Party (SS, SA, etc.),
he noted ‘NS [National Socialist] Riding Corps’. This was a reference to an equestrian
society organized by students at the Consular Academy in November 1938, when Waldheim was finishing up his studies there. Though they rode out of a public riding school on the Rasumofskygasse in
Vienna, the riding club, like all student equestrian groups, was absorbed into the Nazi SA brownshirted storm troops sometime in 1939, but Waldheim insists he was no longer there and never wore an
SA uniform. While this led to a 1985 quip by Socialist Chancellor Fred Sinowatz, Bruno Kreisky’s successor, that Waldheim ‘wasn’t a member of the SA; only his horse was’, so
pervasive was the Nazi absorption of existing Austrian organizations that, forty years earlier, Waldheim’s rare acknowledgement was either overlooked or dismissed.

Kurt Waldheim was given a three-month probationary appointment as Provisional Attaché in the Chancellor’s Office’s Department of Foreign Affairs effective 1 December 1945.
With his wife and daughter, he moved in with Cissy’s parents in bombed-out Vienna until they could find a flat of their own.

The denazification of Kurt Waldheim was a perfunctory affair throughout. Having been linked – however tenuously and largely by absorption – to the Nazi Student
Union as well as the SA Cavalry Corps, he became Denazification Case SK235 in an administrative inquiry that the Allies had required to purge all former Nazis from the new Austrian administrative
machinery.

Complete with character references from anti-Nazis and his negative 1940 Nazi evaluation plus a two-page personal statement
in which he stressed the
‘sportslike’ character of his SA Cavalry Corps connection, the application Kurt Waldheim submitted on 25 January 1946 also contained one clear-cut mis-statement:

In reality, the 200-schilling grant was one of four held up after the Anschluss for review of the nominees’ Aryan and Nazi credentials. Two of them were replaced by Nazi
activists, but the other two, Kurt Waldheim and Hans Schernhorst, were sustained. Waldheim received his grant two months after the Anschluss.

Early in 1946, the Austrian government’s Ministerial Committee for Denazification was given three months (later extended to 30 June) to investigate the wartime pasts of 13,000 federal
employees ranging from janitors to Cabinet ministers. By 29 June, when the committee had resolved not quite half its caseload and had not yet taken up SK235, the Foreign Ministry took matters into
its own hands. It simply retrieved Waldheim’s dossier and appointed him to the Austrian Foreign Service as a career diplomat, retroactive to 1 June. In November 1946, he was formally notified
that he was neither subject to any penalties arising from former Nazi affiliations nor required to register with the government as a former Nazi.

To Simon Wiesenthal, who opposes the concepts of collective guilt
and
collective innocence, the perfunctory denazification of postwar Austria ‘was almost a case of collective
amnesia.’ In this regard, if in no other, Kurt Waldheim was a particularly ordinary Austrian. He began practising the art of forgetting as early as mid-1946, when Gruber was preparing to
represent Austria at a crucial January 1947 meeting in London of the Deputy Foreign Ministers of the Big Four powers occupying his country. High on the agenda were Yugoslavia’s claims to
parts of southern Carinthia
which Tito’s partisan army had ‘liberated’ bloodily in the last days of the war in Europe, only to be chased away when British
troops arrived. As he and Gruber cast about for experts to serve in the delegation, Waldheim, though eager to see England for the first time, never mentioned his own wartime experience in
Yugoslavia.

Waldheim went anyway – newly promoted to the rank of Legation Secretary, which qualified him for future assignment to an Austrian embassy abroad. As the delegates convened in London, the
Austrians were greeted with a well-orchestrated Yugoslavian propaganda campaign against them. Waldheim’s military superior, General Löhr, was put on trial in Belgrade for atrocities
committed by Army Group E. Reminding the Four Powers that Löhr was an Austrian, the Yugoslavs in London accused Austria of having fought on Hitler’s side and having forcibly
‘Germanized’ thousands of Slovenes living in Austria’s southernmost province, Carinthia. Not only did Tito’s team attack Austria for protecting war criminals and
rehabilitating Nazis, but, on 30 January, they denounced a star member of Gruber’s delegation – Hans Piesch, the Socialist governor of Carinthia – as a Nazi collaborator and
demanded his expulsion from the conference.

Having cleared and worked with him, the British and the Americans angrily defended Piesch, but the Russians insisted upon a full investigation in Austria. To make matters worse, British
investigators soon learned that Piesch had indeed worked for the Nazis as an official of Heinrich Himmler’s Office for Race and Settlement. Piesch was forced to resign his governorship.

Bogged down in Balkan crossfire, the deputies’ conference dissolved in late February with no decision reached. The next round would be the Big Four Foreign Ministers’ meeting in
Moscow at the end of March. In the meantime, Yugoslavia convicted and executed General Löhr as a war criminal, but, still respecting his military status, honoured his request to be shot
instead of hanged.

In Moscow in 1947, the chief of Tito’s delegation, Edvard Kardelj, renewed the attack on Austria by claiming that more than eighty of Hitler’s generals had been Austrians and the
execution of General Löhr should be just the beginning of compliance with 1943’s Moscow Declaration. Austria was also a refuge for Ustashi and other Yugoslavian Nazis, said Kardelj, who
declared that ‘Austria should deliver all war criminals and traitors to the nation that was the victim
of their crimes or treason.’ The conference ended on 24
April 1947, with no decision on the territorial question that was really at issue.

In the summer of 1947, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry in Belgrade, studying the personnel rosters of General Löhr’s Army Group E, recognized that the Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim on
Löhr’s intelligence staff was the same tall, quiet young man now sitting at Austrian Foreign Minister Gruber’s side whenever he fought off Yugoslavia’s territorial claims in
London and Moscow. Around the same time, Captain Egberts-Hilker was hanged in Belgrade for the 1944 massacres of 114 villagers in the German response to Lieutenant Waldheim’s intelligence
reports of partisan activity on the road between Stip and Kocani. And the Yugoslavs discovered that sitting in their Kalvarija-Zemun POW camp was former Army Group E personnel clerk Johann Mayer,
who already had the status of an informer. To further ingratiate himself with his captors and hasten his return to Vienna, Mayer stood ready to accuse Lieutenant Waldheim of everything from
ordering murders to being a pre-1938 illegal Nazi.

Seeing that they were having no luck prying Ustashi fugitives loose from Austria, the Yugoslavs decided to take their case against Waldheim to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) in
London. But UNWCC was one of the first casualties of the Cold War: because the US and the Soviet Union were unwilling to share intelligence with each other and reluctant to entrust information to a
neutral body that might share it, the Commission was due to die on 31 March 1948. It would not consider any cases submitted after 31 December 1947. With this deadline in mind, on 12 December, the
Yugoslav Interior Ministry prodded the Foreign Ministry ‘to make a decision on Gruber’s assistant, Lieutenant Waldheim, on the basis of which he could be registered by the United
Nations War Crimes Commission’ and ‘bear in mind that the deadline for such registration will expire at the end of this year.’

Around that time, Anton Kolendic, deputy director of the Yugoslav military delegation in Vienna, received a secret list from Belgrade of thirty ‘war criminals’ living in Austria.
Kolendic was surprised to see the name of Kurt Waldheim, with whom he had frequent contact, fourth on the list, heavily underlined, but was unable to contribute more to the investigation than the
fact that Waldheim had never even mentioned to him that he’d served in Yugoslavia during the war.

‘I looked carefully through his file because it was unusually detailed,’ Kolendic recalled in 1986 to Dusko Doder of the
Washington Post
.
‘We’d had such lists and files coming all the time, but, in the vast majority of cases, documentation was short and weak. We’d never had such a well-documented file before. At
least, I don’t remember seeing one.’

As instructed by Belgrade, Kolendic passed the secret list on to his Soviet counterpart, a Colonel Gonda. So it is certain that Russia knew at least a fragment of the truth Kurt Waldheim was
concealing, which made him blackmailable by Soviet intelligence. And Kolendic, at least, is ‘absolutely sure’ the Russians approached Waldheim. ‘When you are in the intelligence
business,’ he told Doder, ‘you have a way of knowing such things. I dealt with Gonda regularly and we became quite friendly.’

‘No such attempt perceivable to Dr Waldheim was made,’ presidential spokesman Gerold Christian tried to assure Doder in late 1986. ‘Dr Waldheim was never approached by any
country in a manner implied by your question.’ Groping for confirmation, Doder could only quote an unnamed ‘former intelligence operative who held the rank of colonel in the Yugoslav
secret police at the time’ and said that, in early 1948, the Russians told Colonel Boro Leontic, a Yugoslav intelligence liaison man, that ‘Waldheim was recruited and the Yugoslavs
should stop their interference.’ Colonel Leontic could not be located thirty-eight years later.

On 18 December 1947, the Yugoslav State Commission for the Determination of Crimes Committed by the Occupying Forces and their Collaborators indicted Kurt Waldheim for ‘murders and
slaughters, executions of hostages, [and] wanton destruction and arson’, holding him responsible for ‘preparing, issuing, and acting upon criminal orders while his group operated in
Yugoslavia.’ The seven-page indictment concluded that:

Eight days later, the chairman of the commission informed the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry that it had declared Waldheim, ‘at this time on the staff
of the Austrian Minister Dr Gruber’, a war criminal and asked it to lodge the indictment with UNWCC in London ‘emphasizing the special importance we attach to this
registration.’

Despite their demand for Waldheim’s extradition, this was not the Yugoslavs’ real aim. They wanted to plant a time-bomb they could explode at the next Big Four ministers’
conference to embarrass Gruber the way they had with their accusations against Governor Piesch of Carinthia. With this in mind, their goal was to persuade UNWCC to put Waldheim on its
‘A’ list of alleged war criminals for whom there was good reason to assume that, if tried, they would be convicted.

While the Yugoslav delegation to UNWCC was translating the indictment against Waldheim into English for a hearing in February, the same UNWCC committee that would rule on Waldheim denied a
Yugoslav request to put a former German Army intelligence officer, a Lieutenant Hanzer, on the ‘A’ list because just the job was not proof of a war crime in the absence of actual
participation. Recognizing that this ruling would weaken their case against Waldheim, the Yugoslavs altered Johann Mayer’s testimony that some German Army deserters were executed on orders
from Army Group E’s intelligence section (with the concurrence of the chief of staff, General Schmidt-Richberg, and General Löhr himself) to
‘They were executed according to
the order given by Waldheim.’
Similarly, testimony by Löhr’s aide-de-camp, Major Mellinghoff, that reprisals against civilians were taken ‘on the basis of the highest
orders.
This is also valid for the sphere of activity of Section
Ic’ (the intelligence section in which Waldheim worked) was altered to ‘by the German general staff and
high-ranking German officers.
The same line of action was taken by the accused’
(= Waldheim).