Waldheim asserted that he had never belonged to a Nazi-affiliated group. “Our family was under constant surveillance,” Kurt Waldheim wrote. Because of his anti-Nazi sympathies, Walter Waldheim was twice arrested by the Gestapo and lost his job. In March 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered his army into Austria and annexed the country in what became known as the Anschluss. Waldheim wrote in his 1985 memoir, “In the Eye of the Storm.” Thanks to his parents’ middle-class standing, Kurt and his brother and sister endured few of the economic deprivations that most Austrians did during the 1920’s, when Austria was a “defeated, ruined, truncated remnant of the former Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire,” Mr. His father, Walter, the son of an impoverished blacksmith, became the local school superintendent and married a daughter of the mayor. Waldheim insisted, “just as hundreds of thousands of other Austrians did their duty.” He became a soldier in Hitler’s army, Mr. They identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and forced into their military service. Waldheim’s life as a parable of their own. Waldheim’s involvement with the Nazi movement as a student and his wartime role in the Balkans.īut the revelations were met by a nationalist, anti-Semitic backlash in Austria that aided Mr. During his campaign, political opponents, investigative journalists, historians and the World Jewish Congress uncovered archival evidence of Mr. It was not until he ran for president of Austria in 1986 that his wartime past became widely known. Waldheim, who had reached the pinnacle of the Austrian foreign ministry, went on to serve two terms as secretary general from 1972 to 1982. Waldheim’s wartime record years before he stood for election as secretary general but chose to conceal it. And according to a bipartisan letter from Congress sent to President Bill Clinton, the Central Intelligence Agency was aware of Mr. Waldheim on suspicion of involvement in war crimes. Waldheim to account or even to reveal his history.Ī former Yugoslav intelligence official, Anton Kolendic, said he informed his Soviet counterparts “in late 1947 or 1948” that his government was seeking Mr. The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes.”īy early 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission listed him as a suspected war criminal subject to trial. “But this non-guilt must not be confused with innocence. Robert Edwin Herzstein of the University of South Carolina, a historian whose archival research was crucial in uncovering Mr. “Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite, or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime,” wrote Prof. Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations. Waldheim concealed his wartime service in the Balkans, saying his military career ended in 1942, after he was wounded on the Russian front.īut more than four decades later, his assertions were controverted by eyewitnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Mr. Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between 19. The cause was heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported. His death was announced by the office of the Austrian president, Heinz Fischer, and by Mr. Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes was exposed late in his career, died today at his home in Vienna.
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