Nazi Hunter (76 page)

At that time, the people bent on incriminating Waldheim at all costs of truth had no notion that he had been at Kozara and close to the powers behind still other atrocities. Says historian
Herzstein succinctly, if pejoratively: ‘They framed the right guy.’

At its final session on 26 February 1948, attended by British and American representatives, Committee I of UNWCC placed Kurt Waldheim on its seventy-ninth ‘A’ list
of wanted war-crimes suspects:
one of 37,000 names on what would be a total of eighty lists. Despite their keen interest in Waldheim, the Yugoslavs presented his file with
eleven other cases and didn’t hint that they knew where this fugitive from their justice was living and working. Another seventy-two Czech, Dutch, and Greek cases were submitted at the same
session, so it is unlikely that the Waldheim dossier received more than a minute or two’s cursory attention. A month later, just before going out of business, the full United Nations War
Crimes Commission approved the committee’s last lists.

In April, the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, which assisted in the apprehension of war criminals, received the UNWCC
lists from London and routinely added Waldheim’s name to its index of 69,000 wanted war criminals, suspects, and witnesses. Though the Yugoslavs rejoiced because, back in May 1945, the Allies
had decreed automatic extradition for anyone whose name appeared on the CROWCASS list, they made no effort to tell the hunters of war criminals where Waldheim could be found. Their time-bomb was
still ticking . . .

But it was not destined to detonate at the Big Four ministers’ conferences of 1949 – or for another thirty-eight years. Dislike between Stalin and Tito had widened into a breach that
led Stalin to expel Yugoslavia’s communist party from the Cominform
⁷⁹
in June and impose an economic blockade by the communist world. This,
in turn, left Yugoslavia with four opponents in the Big Four and a need to woo its Western neighbours, including occupied Austria, for closer economic ties. Such nasty issues as territory and war
criminals were dropped from the table and, in fact, Yugoslavia informed Austria that all her POWs would be repatriated by the end of the year. Among them was the Yugoslavs’ key living witness
against Waldheim, Johann Mayer, released on 22 July 1948.

There was a more immediate reason, however, why Yugoslavia didn’t explode its Waldheim bombshell at the ministerial meetings. Once again, with the luck and agility that lifted him to
higher plateaus
whenever the ground beneath him started to crumble, Waldheim was The Man Who Wasn’t There. For, on 14 January 1948, Gruber had granted his request to be
reassigned as First Secretary of the Austrian Legation in Paris, where Gerhard Waldheim was born three months later.

‘Dr Herzstein tried very hard in his book to say that I was transferred from Vienna to Paris because the Austrian government was afraid the Yugoslavs would ask for my
extradition,’ President Kurt Waldheim told me ruefully in 1989. ‘I tried to convince him that this was not so, because Dr Gruber didn’t know what was happening with my file or
even that there was one – and neither did I. Besides, if they had really wanted to extradite me to Yugoslavia, it would have been easier to get me from Paris than from Vienna.’

After three happy years in Paris, Waldheim was recalled to Vienna to head the Foreign Ministry’s personnel department. His new job gave him access to and control over every
employee’s records, including his own.

Though bureaucrats throughout history have used that power to settle scores and blackmail rivals or superiors, Waldheim might have had other aims. ‘It was around this time,’ writes
Herzstein, ‘that a vague grey mist began to descend over Kurt Waldheim’s past – when the crucial years between 1941 and 1945 seemed to go missing. Among other things, it became
apparent in the early 1950s that Waldheim’s doctoral dissertation on Konstantin Frantz had disappeared from the library of the University of Vienna . . . The disappearance of Waldheim’s
dissertation was consistent with a pattern of omission that was coming to characterize Waldheim’s way of dealing with his war years. Waldheim rarely, if ever, actually lied about what he had
done during the war; he simply neglected to mention the awkward parts.’ By 1952, his official biography contained not a word about his ever having been in the military.

In the autumn of 1955 – thanks to negotiations led by Bruno Kreisky as Secretary of State, which, in Austria, means the chief civil servant in the Foreign Ministry – the Four-Power
postwar occupation ended and the newly independent nation of Austria was admitted to the United Nations. Leading its first three-man delegation into the General Assembly Hall was
thirty-six-year-old Kurt Waldheim.

Early in 1968, Austria’s ambassador to the United Nations was presiding over a luncheon meeting of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer
Space at his residence on Manhattan’s East Side when he was summoned to the library to take a transatlantic phone call from his Chancellor, Josef Klaus. As he left the room, Kurt Waldheim
heard the American delegate remark: ‘Either he is going to be dismissed or be appointed Foreign Minister.’

After a brief discussion with his wife, Cissy, Waldheim accepted the job, ‘convinced that I had now reached the peak of my career’ at the age of forty-nine.

In his two years as Foreign Minister, Waldheim strengthened neighbourly relations with Yugoslavia by cultivating a personal friendship with Marshal Tito, who invited him often to his island
residence of Brioni and presented him with the Order of the Grand Cross of the Yugoslav Flag. As biographer Herzstein points out: ‘Waldheim had now been decorated by the Fascist Pavelic and
the Communist Tito; he was indeed a flexible man.’

There had been much wrangling about whether Tito knew that he was negotiating with, entertaining, decorating, and, later, supporting for UN Secretary General a man wanted for murder in
Yugoslavia – and, if so, why he went on with it. In the mid-1960s, Tito’s government had purchased many reels of captured German military documents from the US National Archives and, in
1967, had updated its Waldheim file from them.

Tito’s son, Misha Broz, is sure his father knew about his new friend’s past, but considered Waldheim’s wartime actions inconsequential. Tito’s long-time chief of staff,
Mirko Milutinovic, confirmed that ‘I knew Waldheim had been compromised’, but added that ‘Tito did not regard Waldheim as a war criminal.’ Other experts – aware of
Tito’s remoteness, communism’s bureaucracies, and Yugoslavia’s decentralization of paperwork – find it plausible that the Waldheim dossier could have eluded the
dictator’s notice. Still others suspect that, after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Tito gave his highest priority to building up relations with Austria as a bulwark against
another blitzkrieg.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the tallest man in Austria was neither Chancellor Klaus nor his six-foot-three Foreign Minister Waldheim, but five-foot-eight Bruno Kreisky, who had been out of
office almost four years. The Austrian public had grown to like
and respect him when he was playing key roles in coalition governments and negotiating the occupying armies
(particularly the Red Army) out of Austria in 1955. Now, in opposition, they had come to trust and miss him. No People’s Party politician, larger or smaller, measured up to Kreisky’s
stature.

In the national election of 1970, when Kreisky was elected Chancellor, there was no place for Kurt Waldheim in a Socialist Cabinet. But Waldheim was offered his UN position back. No sooner did
he return to work in New York, however, than he took a leave of absence and went back to Austria when the People’s Party asked him to run for President in 1971 against the ailing, but
ever-popular, seventy-one-year-old Socialist incumbent, Franz Jonas. Waldheim’s posters then, as in 1986, proclaimed him as ‘
THE MAN THE WORLD TRUSTS
’.
But, with Austrian socialism swept forward by Kreisky’s new broom, Waldheim was foredoomed to defeat. Still, his 47.2 per cent slice of the vote surpassed even his own expectations and he
returned to New York with more prestige than before: a familiar silhouette now in strong contention for UN Secretary General should U Thant not seek a third term at the end of 1971.

‘The trouble with the Waldheims is that they are too good to be true,’
Time
correspondent Traudl Lessing would write from Vienna a few months later, when U Thant’s
health ruled out the Burmese’s re-election. ‘Waldheim’s election committee during the presidential campaign put out the most insipid stories about the candidate’s shaking of
rough workers’ hands to make the polished Dr Waldheim come to life. There are no anecdotes, there are no dark spots. From 1939 to 1945, Dr Waldheim “never took part in active
politics.” As a Foreign Minister in a People’s Party government and as People’s Party candidate for President, he never joined the party, but remained aloof and independent.
Truly, he is the man who is always there, ready to serve, willing to negotiate, but never ready to rush into battle.’ Not for another fifteen years would Waldheim recast himself as The Man
Who Was Never There.

It was Bruno Kreisky who put forth Kurt Waldheim for Secretary General and activated his Socialist and Third World contacts to push his candidacy. For Kreisky recognized that, as a pair of
French biographers of Waldheim put it, ‘the man would be useful to him. He [Kreisky] was sufficiently familiar with the world to know that a diplomat of Waldheim’s type, with neither
the personality nor the
ability to make his personal mark, can sometimes prove to be more useful than a Metternich, especially when one is representing a small country of
negligible importance on the world scene.’

The invasion of neighbouring Czechoslovakia had alarmed Kreisky to such an extent that he hoped having an Austrian at the head of the UN might give the Russians second thoughts about violating
Austrian sovereignty. As it turned out, Waldheim would go this one or two better by making Vienna the world’s third official UN city (after New York and Geneva) in 1979 and, with
Kreisky’s co-operation, planting a huge new concave orange-striped eyesore of an edifice complex for UN agencies on the shore of the Danube: enough to make even the Red Army of the Brezhnev
era think thrice before swooping.

The UN Secretary General is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council, where each of the Big Five – Britain, China, France, Russia, and the US
– has veto power. The Soviets supported Gunnar Jarring of Sweden, a former ambassador to Moscow, but others ruled him out early because two of the first three Secretary Generals had been
Scandinavians (Trygve Lie of Norway and Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden). China wanted another Oriental to succeed U Thant. The Americans supported Max Jakobson of Finland: a Socialist activist,
journalist, and pro-Israel Jew who faced a sure Soviet veto. ‘Our Arab friends in the General Assembly,’ said a Soviet delegate, ‘would never vote for a Jew.’

Only France favoured Waldheim from the outset – because he spoke French. But he quickly became almost everybody’s second choice. Waldheim invited the Soviet delegate, Jacob Malik, to
lunch and found him talking ‘in rather friendly terms about my candidacy, although he would not commit himself. A few days later, I received a clue to the Soviet attitude when he invited me
back to lunch.’ George Bush, then the US ambassador to the UN, termed Waldheim ‘ideally equipped’ for the job, which Bush’s deputy, Seymour Maxwell Finger, elaborated to
mean that ‘no one saw him as a man of principle. We believed him to be an opportunist, but in the 1970s we wanted a Secretary General who would be malleable.’ In Peking, Kreisky’s
ambassador, Hans Thalberg, without ever mentioning Waldheim by name, lobbied in a low key with Chou En-lai for China to abstain rather than veto.

After the second ballot, only Jakobson and Waldheim were left in contention, but the Russians vetoed Jakobson and then China changed its mind about Waldheim. On Tuesday,
21 December 1971 – Waldheim’s fifty-third birthday – the Security Council recommended that he be elected Secretary General. Oddly, of all the Western nations, only Britain
abstained. The next day, the General Assembly ratified the choice.

‘An odourless, colourless diplomat was required, and the criteria for the choice were specific,’ a high UN official told Waldheim biographers Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen. But,
on the day Waldheim was elected, one young Israeli television journalist, Haim Yavin, smelled a rat when a member of the Austrian delegation whispered to him that Waldheim had a Nazi past. Having
just been granted a five-minute interview, Yavin asked Waldheim point-blank: ‘Did you have any links with the Nazi Party? Were you a Party member?’

Waldheim gave a big smile and shook his head, saying: ‘No links of any kind. On the contrary, my family had many problems during the Nazi period. My father was a teacher and a resolute
anti-Nazi – as we all were: my brother and sister as well. My father was fired from his teaching post and thrown in jail. So you can be certain that there was no reason to cherish even the
slightest friendly sentiment toward the Nazis. On the contrary, we suffered under their domination.’

‘When did you hear about the Holocaust and what had been done to the Jews?’ Yavin asked Waldheim.

‘Well, I had Jewish friends when I was in high school. Some of them live in New York and have been in touch with me. I was deeply moved when I heard about that sort of thing and
couldn’t believe it. But there was not much we could do.’ Yes, he had served as a German officer on the Russian front, but, after being wounded in 1941, ‘the good Lord helped me
and I was sent back home to resume my studies.’ He concluded by reminding Yavin that nobody lifted a finger when Austria was occupied by the Nazis in 1938: ‘The people who criticize us
today ought to remember the call for help to Austria at the time of the Anschluss.’

When his interview was aired in Israel that night, Yavin ‘felt as though the sky had fallen in on me and that I had done something terrible. The broadcasting authorities and the newspapers
were
furious with me for having dared to put such unpleasant questions to such a friendly man.’ Recalling the episode in 1986, Yavin, by then Director of Israeli
Television, said the Foreign Ministry feared that such aggressive questioning might jeopardize Austria’s processing of Soviet Jews emigrating through Vienna, even though the Chancellor of
Austria in 1971 was Jewish.