Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  After the Anschluss in 1938, Wilhelm Ritschel became the Nazi chief of the firm he worked for and not only took his family out of the Catholic Church, but enrolled his daughter Elisabeth, sixteen, in the League of German Maidens, the female Hitler Youth. Two years later, on 20 October 1940, Elisabeth Ritschel, having turned eighteen, applied to the Nazi Party, which granted her membership number 9027854 on 1 January 1941. The Waldheims (through their lawyer, Dr Theo Petter) claim that after she and Kurt announced their engagement later in 1943, she returned to the Church and left the Nazi Party under her fiancé’s influence, but there is no record of her withdrawal.

  While Lieutenant Waldheim was away from Arsakli on his highly rewarding study leave, his permanent unit, the 12th German Army, had been absorbed into Army Group E, commanded by General Alexander Löhr, an Austrian who was executed as a war criminal in Yugoslavia in 1947 for his role in the bombing of Belgrade six years earlier. On 15 January 1943, Adolf Eichmann had come to Salonika to assemble a team. Alois Brunner, his deputy in Greece; Dieter Wisliceny, his newly named representative in Salonika; Max Merten, a special envoy from Berlin, and General Löhr were chosen to implement ‘the Final Solution’ in Salonika. Order MV 1237, signed by Merten, required all Jews over the age of five to wear yellow stars and live in designated ghettoes. And Holocaust historian Gerald Reitlinger, author of The Final Solution, said in 1986 that General Löhr was ‘perhaps more implicated in Jewish deportations than any other German Army commander.’

  The deportation of the Jews of Salonika began in the middle of March 1943: the month Waldheim’s leave ended. From mid-March to mid-May, German Army personnel commanded by General Löhr worked alongside the SS in shipping some 40,000 Greek Jews – one-fifth of the city’s population – to the gas chambers of Poland. Nearly every day, some 2000 Jewish men, women, and children were crammed into German Army freight trains and hauled off to their doom. It was in Salonika that Eichmann added a lurid, but lucrative, feature to ‘the Final Solution’: each deportee had to pay his or her own way to the death camps; half-fare for children under ten; those under four rode free, and there were substantial reductions for the return tickets that everybody sought and nobody used. Eichmann had made elaborate arrangements with the German Ministry of Transport for the Gestapo to be billed by an official agency called the Middle European Travel Bureau, which also packaged Aryan holidays in the Greek islands and other resorts in the widening spectrum of the Third Reich at half-fare group tariffs. The ‘resettlement’ rate the Gestapo paid was four pfennigs per kilometre of railroad track per adult. The deportation of the Jews of Salonika cost almost two million marks, which the victims paid – first with their property and then with their lives.

  In March 1986, when Waldheim first acknowledged his years of military service in the Balkans, he claimed that he had returned to duty on 31 March 1943, by flying to Salonika. But he insisted that a New York Times reporter who interviewed him forty-three years later was the first to tell him of the mass deportation of the Jews of Salonika, even though the assembly point for transports was directly across from the main railway station. ‘I was situated up in the mountains in Arsakli,’ he told the Viennese weekly profil. ‘I swear to you that I didn’t have the least thing to do with the deportation of Jews. I swear to you that I have just found out about it from the press.’ Asked by the German weekly Der Spiegel whether he hadn’t at least seen people wearing yellow stars, Waldheim replied: ‘Not a one of them.’

  When Colonel Roman Loos, the former chief of the German Secret Field Police in the Salonika area, heard this in 1986, he exclaimed incredulously, ‘What?! He didn’t know about that?! It was known to everybody!’ Said Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith: ‘If he did not know what was going on . . . he was probably the world’s most incompetent bureaucrat. If he knew, he is a liar.’

  ‘Yes, he lies,’ Simon Wiesenthal agreed, ‘when he says he never knew about the deportation of the Jews of Salonika when he was there part of the time. How can one-fifth of a city’s people disappear without someone noticing? To everything people say about him, he answers automatically “No”, so sometimes he has to correct his statements. Through these lies, he loses all credibility. But that doesn’t make him a war criminal, for a war criminal is a murderer too.’

  In April 1986, his memory refreshed by controversy, Waldheim changed his personal military chronology to read ‘returned via Tirana in early July 1943.’ He now maintained that he was sent directly to the capital of Albania, which was under Italian occupation, as an interpreter. Subsequently, he produced a letter from his commander there and an affidavit from a fellow interpreter certifying Waldheim’s presence in Tirana around the time he said he was there.

  Waldheim’s paybook also showed that, on 2 April 1943, he was in Belgrade, where he collected 1275 Yugoslavian diners in pay and expenses from Field Office 187 for Staff in Transit. One could quibble, as his critics do, that this still left him time to spend a day or more in Salonika. But a glance at a map shows it to be quite logical that Lieutenant Waldheim, while still in the Vienna area, could have been ordered to travel overland to Tirana via Belgrade, while the route from Salonika to Tirana would not have taken him anywhere near Belgrade. Besides, how much harm could he have done or seen in a few hours in Salonika? It is easy enough to believe that he didn’t encounter a deportation – particularly if he wasn’t there at all then. What is harder to believe is that he at first ‘remembered’ flying from that momentous home leave to somewhere he later said he wasn’t.

  35

  The man who wasn’t there

  A photo from his forgotten-and-then-remembered 1943 Albanian assignment has done Kurt Waldheim more calculable harm than the thousands of words that have been written about his wartime work. On Saturday, 22 May of that year, Lieutenant Waldheim travelled from Tirana to Podgorica (later Titograd in Yugoslavia), a distance of less than a hundred miles, with his chief, Colonel Joachim Macholz, to co-ordinate a meeting between an Italian general and a couple of German generals. The famous picture shows four officers standing beside the wing of a plane (sometimes the wing is cropped out) after bidding farewell to one of the German generals, Rudolf Lüters, who had replaced Bader as German commander in Croatia and was about to fly off to his headquarters in Zagreb. Of the four on the ground, one is the Italian general, Ercole Roncaglia, and facing him is a Waffen SS General, Artur Phleps, holding an attaché case. Between them stand Colonel Macholz and Lieutenant Waldheim. The tallest, most central, and seemingly most commanding figure in the picture is the low man on the totem pole, Lieutenant Waldheim.

  Waldheim’s official defence, ‘The White Book’,76 flies into a frenzy of righteous indignation reflecting the damage done by that one picture, which was unearthed by an amateur photographer in Innsbruck in 1985:

  At first, Dr Waldheim’s critics attempted to present this photograph as evidence of a joint military mission shared by him and an SS general. These critics went so far as to describe the boots he wore as being part of an SS uniform. This absurd conjecture ignored the fact that most German officers wore high-top boots. In addition, Dr Waldheim was commissioned as a cavalry officer and high-top riding boots have traditionally been a standard item of a cavalry officer’s uniform.

  ‘The White Book’ cites Macholz’s testimony that Waldheim was there strictly as an interpreter and adds that ‘in attributing to him the role of a principal because of his prominence in the photograph, his critics once again ignore the obvious: interpreters invariably appear in photographs with the principals they are serving, usually standing between them.’

  To make matters worse, confronted by a New York Times correspondent when the celebrated photo first surfaced at the beginning of March 1986, Waldheim’s initial response was: ‘This is just part of a deliberate hate campaign.’ Later, he would remember only that when, in translating, he softened some of Phleps’ hard language exhorting the Italians to commit more manpower and energy to the war effort, the SS
general – a German of Transylvanian origin – turned to him and murmured: ‘You don’t realize that I know Italian. Would you please translate what I say?’

  Like many interpreters who serve as conduits of fast-moving conversation, Waldheim has no recollection of what he translated that day – and the same might have been true if he’d tried to recall it that very night. But there is no question that a topic of discussion at Podgorica on 22 May 1943 was Operation Black (Unternehmen Schwarz), which had been launched a week earlier to wipe out partisan resistance in the Yugoslav lands of Montenegro and Croatia. The 6 May operating order from the German command in Croatia had specified that ‘troops must move against the hostile populace without consideration and with brutal severity.’ On 23 May, the day after Waldheim was photographed with him, General Phleps, as commander of the Waffen SS Prinz Eugen Division, launched a clean-up of the Podgorica area. In 1986, the World Jewish Congress implied that Waldheim’s chief, Colonel Macholz, stayed on to co-ordinate Italian participation in Operation Black. So where was Waldheim? His response: ‘I don’t remember anything.’

  When Operation Black ended that June, more than 16,000 ‘enemies’ of Germany were dead, of whom 12,000 were listed only as ‘communists’. Just 1500 ‘enemies’ were held as prisoners.

  How did Kurt Waldheim evolve from a discreetly outspoken critic of the Nazi tyranny he served grudgingly as a self-described ‘low-level desk lieutenant’ into a passive accessory who saw no evil, heard no evil, and, if he spoke any evil, shrouded it in the kind of euphemisms (‘special treatment’, ‘mopping-up’ and ‘cleansing operations’, etc.) that were the coded language of the Third Reich? Robert Herzstein – a University of South Carolina historian who, working for the World Jewish Congress for ten days in March 1986, found no fewer than nineteen intelligence reports signed by Waldheim himself in the US National Archives in Washington – insists that, by the end of 1942, ‘Waldheim was a highly competent, upwardly mobile, politically reliable, high level German intelligence officer.’ But Markus Hartner, a non-commissioned officer who was cartographer for Army Group E in Waldheim’s section, told Yugoslavian war-crimes investigators in early 1948 that, throughout the time he knew him, Waldheim ‘rejected National Socialism [Nazism], not so much for social or scientific reasons, but much more for reasons of faith and conservatism.’ Waldheim himself has boasted how Austrian soldiers who opposed the Anschluss greeted each other with a more Catholic ‘Grüss Gott!’ instead of the official ‘Heil Hitler!’ And his predecessor in the intelligence job at Arsakli, Dr Werner Schollen, a retired notary and lawyer more than four decades later, said that Waldheim used to speak openly in the officers’ mess, where ‘he certainly didn’t have a reputation that he supported the Nazis. He was very critical about them.’

  Hartner, who worked with Waldheim until 1945 and was captured at the end of the war, said that, when the new officer first arrived in Arsakli in mid-1942, ‘he was not very popular owing to his volatile, unrestrained, and somewhat haughty nature’, but ‘later on, he became more considerate and friendly. As to myself, he treated me in a very accommodating manner since I was able to put calls through to his wife.’ If this implies opportunism, it is not as devastating as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s opinion of Waldheim’s secret of subsequent success: ‘Of my meetings with him, I have retained the impression that this man is living proof of the untruth of the dictum that nature abhors a vacuum. He is vacuum itself. Neuter and neutral. The opposite of an exceptional human being. He was ideal for the job of UN Secretary General, where no intellectual initiative is required.’

  It is safe to say that, returning to the Balkans with his doctoral dissertation nearly completed and the girl that he’d marry constantly in mind, the young Lieutenant Waldheim had every incentive to stay alive and toe the line. Commuting between courtship in Vienna and combat zones on the fluctuating Balkan front, he had only to do ‘nothing but my duty as a soldier’ to stay out of trouble in wartime. For this, no unexceptional human being can be faulted. The questions that remain are not just What were Waldheim’s duties? and What were their consequences?, but also the familiar American question asked of presidents from Nixon to Bush, from Watergate to Enron: How much did he know and when did he know it?

  After reporting back to his base in Arsakli at the beginning of July 1943, First Lieutenant Waldheim was dispatched to Athens as one of three officers on the German general staff working with the 11th Italian Army in the Greek capital. From 19 July to 21 August, one of his duties was to write the staff’s war diary. On 8 August, using his unit’s approved terminology of referring to partisans as bandits, Waldheim noted:

  Appropriate instructions are being sent to the 1st Mountain Division concerning treatment of bandits. According to a new order from the Führer, bandits captured in battle are to be shot. Others suspected of banditry, etc., are to be taken prisoner and sent to Germany for use in labour details.

  Slave labour was needed to fuel Germany’s faltering war machine. Two days later, in Arsakli, General Löhr issued an order extending the net beyond the pool of suspected partisans:

  It may also be necessary to seize the entire male population – insofar as it does not have to be shot or hanged on account of participation in or support of the bandits, and insofar as it is incapable of work – and bring it to the prisoner collecting points for further transport into the Reich.

  For weeks, the German Army’s 1st Mountain Division – operating in the Pindus range of north-western Greece – had been seeking authorization to deport the entire male civilian populations of areas in which it was conducting sweeps against partisans. Hitler’s order and Löhr’s expansion of it (both of which were introduced at the postwar Nuremberg trials as evidence of wartime atrocities) hinted that the time might be at hand. On 15 August 1943, the Mountain Division radioed this message to Athens:

  From reports and Italian information, reinforced impression of heavy bandit concentrations in the area south-east of Arta. Bridgehead formations by groups seem particularly promising, for which reason scheduled clean-up operations in this area are deemed necessary. Hope of success only if all male civilians are seized and deported. . .

  Civilians continue to maintain waiting attitude. No doubt concerning total enemy engagement. Ioannina and Jewish Committee operating there must be regarded as centre of preparations for a resistance movement. . .

  The transmission was received and certified ‘correct’ by Lieutenant Waldheim, who then forwarded it to the chief of the German general staff in Athens, General Heinz von Gyldenfeldt. In his reply, Gyldenfeldt told the 1st Mountain Division: ‘Concerning the rounding up of the male civilian population, clarity should have been created by the recent order’ of General Löhr. In other words: Go ahead and do it, hut don’t blame me.

  Waldheim’s ‘White Book’ argues with some merit and considerable acerbity that:

  . . . Dr Waldheim’s critics contend that these entries make him liable for the actions of the troops operating pursuant to that order.

  The fact is that these entries do not indicate the initiation or implementation of any order or action, but merely show the recording by the German liaison staff of orders issued to a German unit by a higher command. Because Dr Waldheim had no role in the formulation, drafting, or issuance of these orders, he was in no position to modify their directives or to prevent their implementation.

  Or, as Simon Wiesenthal put it: ‘The war wouldn’t have stopped if Waldheim had protested. His chair might be empty for ten minutes, but then somebody else would be sitting in it.’

  The German Army in Greece rode close herd on their balky Italian partners that summer as the Allies invaded Sicily on 10 July 1943. Mussolini was ousted and imprisoned two weeks later. His successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, dissolved the Fascist Party and, on 3 September in Algiers, signed an armistice with the Allies. Five days later, it was revealed that Italy had surrendered unconditionally. Freed by the Germans, Mussolini set up a fascist puppet gover
nment in northern Italy. Meanwhile, Badoglio’s Italy – joining the Allies as a ‘co-belligerent’ – declared war on Germany.

  Overnight, unreliable partners became prisoners of war in Greece – and Waldheim, with his command of the Italian language, was a go-between when his immediate superior, Lt-Col. Bruno Willers, met with his Italian counterpart to negotiate the surrender of the 11th Italian Army. After laying down their arms peaceably, the Italian troops waited, rather naïvely, for the Germans to ship them home – ‘by way of Germany’, they were told. There, however, tens of thousands of Italian officers and enlisted men were interned in forced labour camps.

  From July in Arsakli, when his liaison team was briefed by Löhr and Gyldenfeldt on what to do if Italy suddenly left the Axis, to the end of September, when the last of the 11th Army was shipped north from Greece, Lieutenant Waldheim knew the score better than almost anybody else. Dr Hagen Fleischer, a history professor at the University of Crete who began investigating Waldheim’s past the day he was named United Nations Secretary General in 1971, says he has ascertained that, after participating in the 11th Army’s surrender negotiations, Waldheim ‘personally interrogated Italian prisoners when the Germans, fearing the Italians would desert to . . . the underground resistance movement, embarked upon punitive operations.’ Colonel Willers, however, insists to this day that Waldheim not only ‘wouldn’t have hurt a fly’, but didn’t have the authority to.