Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  There is no evidence, however, that Lieutenant Waldheim and his communications team were ever present at deportations or ‘pacification operations’. In fact, what little is known portrays a relatively peaceful and sometimes conversationally daring twenty-three-year-old making the best of a faintly threatening assignment in the hinterlands. From Italian witnesses, we learn that he was well liked in Pljevjla, particularly by one of the daughters of the Rabrenovic family, in whose home he was billeted; from Yugoslav witnesses, that he was generous in sharing chocolates with the natives; and, from various eye-witnesses, that he was seen playing cards and chatting by candlelight with General Giovanni Esposito, chief of the Pusteria Division, over tea in a local pastry shop. Most remarkably, in a 1987 military history of Italy’s campaigns in the area between 1941 and 1943, Giacomo Scoti writes:

  Many of our officers who belonged to the Pusteria Alpine Division remember Lt Kurt Waldheim with fondness due to his astonishing anti-Nazi position. Capt. Giuseppe Trabattoni, [now a] notary in Milan, recalls that the statements and attitudes of the young German liaison officer created a certain embarrassment and much concern among his interlocutors who were not used to discussing politics in public. Kurt Waldheim was also liked by our Alpinists for his cordial and informal behaviour, as is reported in the diary of Corporal Pompeo De Poli from Belluno.

  De Poh’s diary tells how Waldheim’s mobile unit pulled into an Italian base at Cajnice for a couple of days. As soon as the team of four Germans disembarked, Lieutenant Waldheim was invited to the officers’ mess, but insisted on eating with his men in the canteen: an example from which, De Poli hints, his superiors could have benefited. Be that as it may, hob-nobbing with his higher-ups and translating and transmitting radio traffic, Lieutenant Waldheim could scarcely have been unaware, as he steadfastly maintains, of what the Bader Combat Group and Pusteria Infantry Division were doing to civilians in Yugoslavia.

  This was confirmed in 1988 by Zola Genazzini, an Italian former lieutenant in the division’s Alpine Artillery, who remembers Waldheim in Pljevlja not only as ‘the first German officer I ever saw’, but also as a friend who, soon after joining the Italians, asked him at an Easter banquet whether it was true that some of the other guests had been killing civilians. In particular, Waldheim asked Genazzini whether a Major Ricci had killed captured, disarmed partisans in cold blood after a battle. When the answer was yes, Waldheim remarked that this meant General Esposito ‘had not taken the necessary disciplinary provisions, measures, against these officers.’ According to Genazzini, Waldheim added that he would talk to General Esposito about it.

  Like so much about the recent Kurt Waldheim, this episode is a double-edged sword: used in his favour, it shows conscience, revulsion, and a desire to impose the traditional rules of war upon an immoral framework. Used against him, it indicates knowledge and awareness. In this case, the positive side of the sword so outshone the negative that I was surprised in 1989 – when I brought ex-Lieutenant Genazzini’s recollection before President Waldheim for the first time he’d ever heard it – that he could not recollect Genazzini or their talk about the specific killings or, for that matter, an Easter dinner, though the name of Major Ricci struck a vague responsive chord.

  ‘Frankly,’ Waldheim told me, ‘the Italian officers remember me much better than I remember them, but that’s because there were so many of them and I was the only German officer there. A German colonel was supposed to be sent there as the liaison officer, but he took sick and never showed up, so although I was sent there just as an interpreter, to the Italians I was their liaison with the Germans. I wouldn’t refute Genazzini’s observations because the reactions sound like mine, but I wouldn’t be saying the truth if I told you I remembered such a conversation.’

  ‘Did you ever have that conversation with General Esposito?’ I asked Waldheim.

  ‘I had several conversations with General Esposito,’ he replied. ‘He was always very friendly to me and I always tried my best to see that there weren’t any sort of retaliatory actions.’ But Waldheim did not recall ever discussing Major Ricci’s doings with the General and agreed with me that any lieutenant surely would remember dressing down a general for not maintaining military discipline if he had ever done so.

  On the other hand, Yugoslav journalist Bozidar Dikic – to whom Waldheim in 1986 first acknowledged his 1942 presence in Pljevlja – points out that Waldheim worked inside the Pusteria Division’s compound where scores of Yugoslav civilians were being held as hostages against partisan attacks. At the beginning of 1942, the Italian governor of Montenegro, General Alessandro Pircio Biroli, had decreed that, for every Italian soldier killed or wounded, fifty Yugoslavs would die. The Bader Combat Group was pressing its Italian allies to join an offensive against the partisans of communist leader Josip Broz, who had just assumed the nom de guerre of Tito, to the north and east. ‘To cover up their reluctance to do battle,’ says Dikic, ‘the Pusteria Division carried out a bloodbath. On 4 May 1941, they shot thirty-two hostages.’ Waldheim was seen by hostages from their prison windows, according to Dikic, who interviewed survivors of the Pljevlja arrests, two of whom told him that, while in custody, they saw Waldheim. ‘He knew precisely about arrested civilians in the Italian prisons in Pljevlja,’ Dikic insists, ‘and of mass shootings of hostages.’

  In mid-May 1942, its mission successfully completed, the Bader Group was dissolved. At the end of the month, Waldheim was transferred to the Command Staff of the West Bosnian Combat Group stationed in the spa of Banja Luka, some 140 miles north-west of Pljevlja. Again the mission was to liquidate partisan resistance and its civilian support – this time in the Kozara mountain range, where Tito was gathering strength.

  Waldheim’s new outfit was part of the German Army’s 714th Infantry Regiment under the command of General Friedrich Stahl, who celebrated both his fifty-third birthday and the imminent launching of ‘Operation Kozara’ with a banquet in Banja Luka on Sunday, 14 June 1942. Among the ninety invitees who were serenaded with Handel’s ‘Water Music’, the guest list showed twenty-five German officers, of whom the lowest ranked was Lt Kurt Waldheim. He was remembered by the evening’s master of ceremonies, First Lt Heye Deepen, as ‘shy about his slightly halting gait’, but ‘an upstanding young officer of uncommon politeness with Austrian charm, yet very reserved.’ Also present was a Croatian minister named Oskar Turina, who was in charge of ‘refugees’ for the Ustashi, a fascist-inspired separatist and terrorist organization that had become the Nazi puppet government of an Independent State of Croatia in 1941. In Ustashi terms, Turina’s ‘refugee’ work meant ‘deportation’ duty: euphemism within euphemism.

  What was ‘Operation Kozara’? Ajoint German-Croat sweep and purge in the summer of 1942, the entire action later came to be known as the Kozara Massacres. While thousands of partisan fighters were slaughtered in combat during late June and the first half of July, at least as many unarmed civilians were shot in ‘reprisal’ executions. Then, after the fighting died out on 18 July, the ‘mop-up’, which lasted through August, proved even more deadly. According to Mlado Stanic, a partisan commander, ‘the Ustashi and the Germans destroyed everything they found that lived: chickens, cats, dogs, children, women, old folk – everyone! Anyone who somehow survived the first purge was swept away in the next wave.’

  Some 68,000 people – mostly women and children – were deported to concentration camps set up by the Ustashi Minister of Interior, Andrija Artukovic (extradited from California, with some help from Simon and the Wiesenthal Centre, forty years after the war). Arriving prisoners were burned alive in the ovens of a converted brickyard at Jasenovac and, when that didn’t alleviate overcrowding, Artukovic’s ministry gave orders to poison the food of infants.

  More than half the deportees never reached the makeshift Croatian concentration camps, but perished of starvation, exhaustion, and brutality during the long marches to their doom. All this was done with German approval. Captured German documents in the US National Ar
chives in Washington praise the ‘final liquidation’ of ‘sub-humans’, carried out ‘with neither pity nor mercy’ because ‘harshness alone can give peace to the country and only a cold heart can command what needs to be commanded in order to make this fertile godly garden of Bosnia bloom again for everybody.’ Half a century later, the same language would be used by Serbs to justify genocide in Bosnia in the name of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

  Where was Waldheim while all this was happening with no little help from his Combat Group? For forty-four years, he never mentioned his presence in the area at all in public. Then, cornered by the press early in March 1986, he first said he’d played a minor role and knew of no war crimes or atrocities ascribed to his units. ‘All I did was interpret between Italian and German commanders,’ he told Reuters and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

  Almost three weeks later, when his signature was found on documents mentioning casualties in the West Bosnian Division’s ‘mopping-up’ activity (in all of Operation Kozara, only thirty-five Germans were killed and eighty-five wounded), he explained that it was routine for a staff officer to ‘report on events . . . That was a perfectly normal activity and has nothing to do with atrocities or criminal acts. That was a completely correct and respectable activity . . . I was thoroughly aware of the hardness of the fighting, but . . . I never saw a partisan and never came into physical contact’ with one.

  Still sticking to his role as strictly an interpreter, Waldheim took to Austrian television to deny rumours that he’d been an intelligence officer interrogating prisoners and asked guilefully: ‘I don’t know a word of Serbo-Croatian, so with what language could I have interrogated Serbo-Croatian partisans? I was an interpreter of Italian and I don’t believe there were any Italian prisoners and even fewer Germans, so the whole thing is completely far-fetched.’ Nevertheless, he had listed Serbo-Croat among his language skills when applying to the Austrian Foreign Ministry after the war.

  In Banja Luka, Waldheim says he served as ‘a junior supply officer on temporary assignment’ to the West Bosnian Combat Group. This was borne out by Ernst Wiesinger, a retired West German federal civil servant who testified in 1986 that, as an enlisted man in 1942, he had been a supply clerk for the West Bosnian Combat Group with an office in a government building next door to the Croatian State Bank in Banja Luka. In the adjoining room sat the quartermaster, a captain named Hermann Plume from the German Army Reserves, and his aide, Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim. Located in Cottbus, then in East Germany, in early 1988, the ninety-one-year-old ex-Captain Plume confirmed that Waldheim remained in Banja Luka the whole time he was stationed there.

  On Wednesday, 22 July 1942 Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim was one of three members of the West Bosnian Combat Group to receive the Ustashi regime’s Silver Medal of the Order of the Crown of King Zwonimir of Croatia with an oak leaf symbolizing ‘courageous conduct in combat’. That the other two recipients were the paymaster and the assistant medical officer would tend to support Waldheim’s claim, in May 1986, that King Zwonimir medals had been ‘handed out like chocolates’ to many general staff officers; so would his award’s number, 916, showing how many such bonbons had already been bestowed in the medal’s six months of existence. Unfortunately for his credibility, a month earlier our chocolate soldier had been saying: ‘I do not remember anybody ever giving me such a medal, ever having it in my hands, and certainly never wearing it.’

  Waldheim has protested: ‘They cover me with garbage and then complain I stink.’ In February 1988, the German weekly Der Spiegel printed a ‘hitherto unknown’ photograph taken a few days after the presentation of King Zwonimir medals. It showed a congratulatory visit by the Ustashi dictator of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, to General Stahl’s headquarters in Banja Luka, with ‘Lieutenant Waldheim’ standing between Pavelic and Stahl the way an interpreter would. President Waldheim, however, said the man in the middle was some other officer, for he wasn’t there.

  That week in Banja Luka, on 27 and 28 July 1942, there was a violent round-up of some 300 local Jews, who were chased through the streets and hauled from their houses by the Ustashi. Waldheim says he knew none of this in his neighbourhood of Banja Luka, despite its being a compact community of fewer than 40,000 inhabitants. On Friday, 31 July, all the Jews of Banja Luka were deported by truck to the Jasenovac concentration camp, where to be Jewish meant instant extermination. Waldheim remembers where he was on that date: on his way to Kostajnica, a town some fifty miles away, for an inspection trip.

  On 14 August, Lieutenant Waldheim was sent on a similar mission to another of his unit’s outposts, in Novska. This was his last special assignment with the West Bosnian Combat Group, which was dissolved at the end of August, its grim mission accomplished.

  ‘Look, I have the big disadvantage,’ Kurt Waldheim conceded not long ago to his son, Gerhard, ‘that nobody wants to put himself in my position. I was eight places in one year doing temporary work I don’t care about, so if I don’t remember where I was at a specific time, it’s because nothing interesting happened, good or bad, and I couldn’t have cared less.’ Turning to me in our late 1988 interview, President Waldheim said: ‘The one great problem I had to face is: if I ask you what you did half a century ago on a certain day and I ask you, “Where have you been on the twenty-fifth of July 1942?” you would have to think and probably wouldn’t remember. And I didn’t remember either . . . Sometimes, only by going through the files to answer some accusations could I find out on paper where I was, but I couldn’t remember whether I ever really was in that village. And sometimes even today I don’t know whether I was ever there. Imagine all the many villages in Yugoslavia if you go from Greece up to the Austrian border; how could I remember all these? If I was asked about the destruction of a village, then certainly I wasn’t there.’

  During the five months of 1942 that Lieutenant Waldheim spent in Yugoslavia on temporary duty with the Bader and West Bosnian Combat Groups, he was permanently assigned to the headquarters staff of the 12th German Army – based in Belgrade when he reported to it in March, but based in Arsakli in north-eastern Greece by the time he rejoined it in late September. His first stay in Arsakli was brief, but pleasant. On a high hill above Salonika (Thessaloniki) and overlooking an inlet of the Aegean Sea, Arsakli was a garden suburb cooled by a mountain breeze unknown to the Macedonian city below, where a German flier had recently measured the airport concrete runway’s temperature at 75° Centigrade (167° Fahrenheit).

  On 13 November 1942, Waldheim was granted a four-month ‘study leave’ to complete his work toward his law degree. He left for Austria six days later, reaching home just in time to enrol in a semi-unofficial seminar given by his favourite professor, Dr Alfred Verdross-Drossberg, at the University of Vienna. Banished from the Consular Academy after the Anschluss but narrowly retained on the University faculty, Verdross was permitted by the Nazi authorities to teach Public International Law; forbidden to give his popular course in Philosophy of Law, he gave it as a private tutorial to a handful of students who could be trusted. Among them in the winter semester of 1942–3 were Norbert Bischoff, later Austria’s first postwar ambassador to Moscow; Franz König, later cardinal and Archbishop of Vienna, and Kurt Waldheim, who was promoted to First Lieutenant in the German Army while studying with the Austro-fascist, but often anti-Nazi, Professor Verdross.

  Toward Christmas of 1942, the Kurt Waldheim who would write so eloquently in 1985 of how impossible it was to leave Austria during the war journeyed to occupied Holland to visit his Consular Academy classmate, Susanne Kempers. He wore civilian clothes: ‘a fabulously elegant suit’, she remembers, adding that it was tailor-made in Paris when he’d been stationed in France in 1940. While clothes alone did not make the man much different to her, she noted that her ‘petit-bourgeois provincial’ admirer had become ‘very much a cosmopolitan man of the world’ since she’d seen him last. Though he thanked her for knitting the scarf that had saved his leg from amputation, his limp and his eyes told her more than
he said to her in words about what he’d experienced in the interim. By bike and on foot, Susanne showed Kurt the devastation wrought by the Germans in Amsterdam. And she told him about deportations of Jews, which had just begun.

  ‘It’s so terrible, so terrible,’ he kept repeating. The next morning, at breakfast, he told her and her mother: ‘If only this war will be over and I survive it, I’ll devote the rest of my life to working for peace.’ To this day, Susanne Kempers Lederer is convinced her old friend kept his promise.

  Back in Vienna early in 1943, Waldheim asked Professor Verdross to assign him a topic for a dissertation that would fulfil the final requirement for his Doctor of Laws degree. Verdross introduced him to the writings of a nineteenth-century Prussian political theorist, Konstantin Frantz (1817–91).

  In his two memoirs – The Challenge of Peace (1977) and In the Eye of the Storm (1985) – Kurt Waldheim did mention that he wrote his dissertation ‘on the federalist principles of Konstantin Frantz’. In April 1986, during Waldheim’s presidential campaign, the Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles announced that it had unearthed Waldheim’s ninety-four-page dissertation in the Austrian National Library archives and proclaimed it to be an ‘endorsement’ of Nazi ideology.

  While Waldheim’s dissertation was neither delivered nor accepted until 1944, most of it was written in early 1943 during his ‘study leave’ from the Balkan front. This was also the time when Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim fell in love with a fellow law student, Elisabeth Charlotte Valerie Ritschel. Tall and pretty and pert with her tresses still in pigtails at twenty-one, she was sometimes called ‘Liselotte’ or ‘Lilo’, later ‘Cissy’. Waldheim writes in his memoirs: ‘Her family had been career officers in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and her father had been seriously wounded during the First World War. When his regiment was finally disbanded, he had become a modestly successful businessman.’ And, Waldheim neglects to add, a member of the illegal Nazi Party in 1934.