Nazi Hunter (77 page)

One of George Bush’s successors at the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, told Bush he would have much preferred Max Jakobson: ‘Our candidate was a Socialist Jew, but instead we installed
a German infantry officer.’ Moynihan spoke hyperbole, for Waldheim never amounted to more in the war than a cavalry officer turned desk jockey. But, for the next decade, that low-level German
lieutenant would be sitting on top of the world.

37

As Secretary General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim quickly came face to face-with the ‘Jewish Problem’ he had sidestepped in Salonika and Austria, Russia and
the Balkans. A bland speech in Montreal early in his tenure was interrupted and enlivened by a young man who stood up and read a petition asking what the UN was doing on behalf of the emigration of
Soviet Jews. The Secretary General simply stood still and silent until detectives came and dragged the man from the hall, still demanding an answer. Waldheim’s reply came only after his
heckler was gone. ‘So you see,’ he told his audience primly, ‘my job is not as easy as it seems.’ Then he resumed reading his set speech.

A different kind of distancing took place in September 1973, when Waldheim paid an official visit to Israel and was taken, as all visitors are, to place a wreath on the Yad Vashem memorial to
Jewish victims of the Holocaust. While Yad Vashem is not a place of worship, male visitors are expected to cover their heads, just as in a synagogue, when they enter the ‘Tent of
Remembrance’, where an eternal flame burns in semi-darkness. Twice offered
yarmulkahs
(skull-caps), Waldheim declined the first and stuck the second into his pocket. According to his
escort, Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner, ‘Waldheim was the first visitor to Yad Vashem ever to have refused to cover his head during this ceremony.’

To Jewish eyes and ears around the world, Kurt Waldheim’s two terms at the helm of the United Nations coincided with the ascendancy of the Third World and an anti-Israel bias; the image of
Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat addressing the General Assembly in 1974 while wearing a revolver holster and bullets; and, above all, the 1975 resolution equating Zionism
with
racism. Even though Waldheim openly opposed that resolution as doing ‘serious damage to the image of the United Nations’, fought to put terrorism on the
General Assembly agenda after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, and resisted numerous Third World initiatives, he was perceived and judged by what often transpired
despite him in his era. ‘The Secretary General of the United Nations is faced with one simple truth,’ Waldheim said. ‘He has no executive power . . . All I have is moral power. I
have nothing behind me. I can write letters to people, I can speak personally to governments, but I have not got the power to force anyone to do anything.’ Too often, however, the messenger
was equated with the message.

The Third World, in fact, had turned on Waldheim with a vengeance and, through its one superpower, China, was able to veto any possibility of a third term as his mandate ran out in 1981. Long
before then, however, hints about his past began to surface in print. As early as 25 August 1973, in the
New York Times Book Review
, Shirley Hazzard mentioned Waldheim’s having been
‘an officer in Hitler’s army on the Russian front’ and was chastized by a UN spokesman for having made ‘a very injurious accusation’, however true. One of
Waldheim’s first and most persistent critics, Hazzard, an Australian-born novelist, elaborated upon Waldheim’s past in the 19 January 1980 issue of the Washington magazine
The New
Republic
, by alleging that Waldheim had ‘taken part in the Nazi youth movement and served in Hitler’s army in various campaigns including the Eastern front.’
The New
Republic’s
editor, Martin Peretz, repeated the accusation in his 27 September issue.

Then, on 9 October 1980, Dr Hillel Seidman, a right-wing Zionist author and activist in his eighties who had survived the Nazi camps, went to a Waldheim press conference at the UN and asked him
specifically whether he had been a member of the Nazi Student Union and the SA: precisely the first charges that would surface on the front pages five and a half years later. The Secretary General
replied blundy: ‘That’s nonsense!’ – and, when Seidman went on to allege in addition that, while serving on the Russian front, Lieutenant Waldheim had played a role in the
extermination of Eastern Jews, the other journalists present dismissed him as a crank.

Back in 1980, Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York had read enough to write to the Secretary General on 26 November
asking about Shirley Hazzard’s accusations.
That was when Waldheim replied:

and, after assuring Solarz that these ‘slanderous’ rumours were a ‘McCarthyesque lie’, added that his omission of his 1942–5 military service in
the Balkans was not meant to mislead: ‘All I said was that after my wound I was no longer fit for service at the front. I meant to say that I could not be sent back to the Russian
front.’

Retiring with honour from the UN in early 1982 on a pension of $83,000 a year (tax free), he taught a term as Distinguished Guest Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, where he also
dictated his memoirs to two research assistants working with 200 boxes of files he took with him. Then he returned to Austria, where, outside the Hotel Imperial, he was promptly knocked down by a
streetcar. Waldheim was treated for shock and bruises in a hospital. And a quip around town was: ‘That’s what happens when you live in limousines. You no longer know how to cross the
street.’

Repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at the UN, Waldheim gave lectures in Europe and America and talked of visiting the four countries to which his career hadn’t
taken him: ‘Bolivia, Swaziland, Western New Guinea, and Botswana.’ But when he started addressing colleagues and former subordinates in the familiar ‘
Du
’ form
instead of the formal ‘
Sie
’, it soon became clear he had a nearer destination in mind: the Presidential Chancellery at the Ballhausplatz end of the Hofburg, the Winter Palace
of the Habsburgs.

President Kirchschläger’s second term would be expiring in 1986 and he wasn’t permitted to try for a third. In the spring of 1985, the opposition People’s Party asked
Waldheim to be its presidential candidate again, as he had been in 1971. Waldheim said he would think it over.

Kurt Waldheim announced his candidacy in September 1985. From Lake Neusiedl on the Iron Curtain with Hungary to Lake Constance on the Swiss and German borders 500 miles to the
west, Austria
was blanketed with posters showing Waldheim at the UN or meeting with world leaders, or else Kurt and Cissy wearing their loden against a mountain backdrop
– and the recurrent slogan: ‘
VOTE FOR A MAN THE WORLD TRUSTS
’.

Unable to coax the ageing, ailing ex-Chancellor Bruno Kreisky out of retirement to die in office (‘I want to save the country the cost of a State funeral,’ he declared in declining),
the Socialists put forth as their presidential candidate Dr Kurt Steyrer, a decent dermatologist who had been Minister of Health and Environment since 1981 under Kreisky and his successor, Fred
Sinowatz. As Steyrer spoke of lowering unemployment, increasing pensions, and improving health care, one could feel and see the crowds wilting from disenchantment with fifteen years of socialism,
which, entrenched in power, was reeling from scandals involving doctored wine, high-level insurance and tax frauds, and the hypocrisy of governing in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party of
ex-SS man Friedrich Peter since 1983. This had brought into Sinowatz’s cabinet a boyish Defence Minister with the Wagnerian name of Friedhelm Frischenschlager, who, in early 1985, embarrassed
Austria by flying to Graz to give a red-carpet welcome (and Austrian citizenship back) to SS Major Walter Reder when Italy released its last war criminal from life imprisonment for massacring the
villages of Marzabotto (1830 dead) and Lunigiana (1200 dead) in 1944.

It was Frischenschlager, too, who gave the Socialists the opening they thought would torpedo Waldheim’s candidacy in a matter of days. Early in 1985, the daughter of executed General
Löhr persuaded Frischenschlager to honour her father with a commemorative plaque on the house where he’d lived in Vienna. In making her case, she pointed out that, after all, Kurt
Waldheim had been his adjutant. Frischenschlager was impressed; like many Austrians of all party affiliations, he took this as exoneration of Löhr, not implication of Waldheim.

Honouring Löhr infuriated a Viennese historian named Georg Tidl, who went to see Michael Graff, general secretary of the People’s Party, in April 1985 to tell him that their potential
candidate was linked to a war criminal. Graff brushed off Tidl with disbelief and the nonchalance of a politician who would eventually find ‘no problem’ with Waldheim ‘so long as
it’s not proved he strangled six Jews with his own hands.’

Tidl did some more homework and, early in 1986, dug up parts of Lieutenant Waldheim’s military career file. When he phoned Wiesenthal, Simon says Tidl asked for help
in proving that the German Army division with which Waldheim was wounded in Russia in 1941 had been incorporated into an SS division in 1945, which Tidl insisted (according to Wiesenthal) would
make Waldheim an SS man. Wondering at this logic, Wiesenthal nonetheless checked his files and found no record of such a merger.

When Frischenschlager allowed some Air Force officers to hang another plaque honouring General Löhr on a wall of the National Defence Academy in Vienna, Tidl took his research to the
Socialist Party. Sensing that their candidate, Steyrer, was slipping behind Waldheim, the Socialists listened and, apparently, bought Tidl’s story. Rather than attack Waldheim fiontally with
it and risk losing the votes of the ‘formers’ (as ex-Nazis are still called in Austria), they leaked it to the World Jewish Congress in New York.

Word of Tidl’s work focused the attention of Hubertus Czernin, a
profil
magazine reporter, on the gaps in Waldheim’s public war record. Czernin called the candidate and
asked for his permission to look up his military files in the State Archives in the interest of dispelling all the gossip that was going around. Waldheim obliged graciously, says Czernin, and
dispatched his secretary to assist the journalist with the necessary clearances and clarifications.

In the archives, Czernin found not just Waldheim’s complete military career record, but details of his affiliations with the SA riding club and Nazi student union. When he went to see
Waldheim about them, however, the candidate simply smiled and shook his head, saying, ‘No, not me, not true.’ Unable to elicit any more concrete answers at that evening meeting, Czernin
went out to a café with two Waldheim aides – press secretary Gerold Christian and chief of staff Peter Marboe. They sat until one in the morning. Recalling that night, Czernin told
Jane Kramer of the
New Yorker
how he exclaimed to Christian and Marboe: ‘Wow! Waldheim must have had terrific contacts to be able to stay in Vienna and study law for two whole years
in the middle of a world war.’

Marboe and Christian were so alarmed by Czernin’s intimations that he says ‘they went back to Waldheim, and then Waldheim said, “Well, maybe I was only sick for two months, and
maybe then I went to the Balkans.” But the thing is, he would never tell the
whole story and this was very annoying, because it turned out that he was one of the
best-informed officers in the Balkans. He knew everything.’

Czernin published his first exposé of Waldheim in
profil
on 3 March 1986. The next day, the
New York Times
carried a front-page story by John Tagliabue of its Bonn
bureau. Datelined Vienna, it appeared under the headline: ‘
FILES SHOW KURT WALDHEIM SERVED UNDER WAR CRIMINAL
’. Tagliabue wrote that his details came not just
from
profil
, but from the World Jewish Congress, ‘and were corroborated independently by
The Times
.’ His story continued on to most of an inside page, which also
contained the famous photo of Lieutenant Waldheim standing between Italian General Roncaglia and German SS General Phleps.