by Alan Levy
Upon his return to headquarters in Arsakli, above the city of Salonika, Waldheim became the third-ranking intelligence officer on General Löhr’s staff. This, said a US Justice Department analysis in 1986, ‘was no mean feat for a young lieutenant.’ In a job that, at Army Group level, was held by captains or majors or even lieutenant-colonels more often than by a reserve lieutenant, Waldheim had two other first lieutenants working under him.
Waldheim’s chief from late 1943 until the end of the war was another achiever: a thirty-year-old Silesian-born lieutenant-colonel named Herbert Warnstorff, who was twenty years younger than his deputy, Major Wilhelm Hammer, a Prussian reserve officer and spa director who walked with a cane thanks to a World War I wound.
Colonel Warnstorff, a successful textile manufacturer after the war, surfaced in 1986 to support Waldheim’s claims that his lieutenant was a mere desk officer during their military months together. Most of the time, said Warnstorff, he let Waldheim give the daily intelligence briefing to General Löhr, who seemed more comfortable with his fellow Austrian than with Waldheim’s Prussian and Silesian superiors. It soon was clear to everybody present that the tall lieutenant was the General’s pet. Briefed by Warnstorff or Hammer, Löhr’s first question would be, ‘Where’s Waldheim?’ Reminded that Waldheim had gone back to Austria in late 1943 for a five-week Christmas-and-study leave, Löhr remarked with fond admiration: ‘That’s right. He’s always studying.’
Waldheim was, indeed, revising his dissertation as well as plighting his troth to Liselotte Ritschel in Vienna. Despite political differences, the clerical-fascist family Waldheim and the Nazi family Ritschel warmed to each other and it was agreed that, if the war didn’t interfere, Kurt and Cissy would marry sometime in mid-1944. Immediately after 1943’s Christmas dinner at the Waldheims in Baden, the fiancé returned to active duty in Arsakli.
There, in addition to briefing General Löhr and important visitors, his duties were to gather and summarize information on enemy movements. In this job, Waldheim was, in the words of the University of Crete’s Professor Fleischer (whose field of history is the German occupation of Greece), ‘one of the best informed men in the German forces’ with knowledge of ‘virtually all aspects of the occupation of the Balkans’, though Fleischer himself is guilty of scholarly over-reach when he adds that ‘it is even probable that he personally attended executions in Yugoslavia.’ With his access to wider information, Waldheim was also one of the first in a position to perceive that the war was lost.
University of South Carolina history professor (and World Jewish Congress researcher) Herzstein concurs that, by the end of 1943, Waldheim ‘had become a major intelligence figure in an Army Group of 300,000 men.’ Dr Herzstein went on to say: ‘In seventeen years of research in German bureaucratic records of that era, I have rarely come across so much responsibility in the hands of so junior an officer.’ In early 1944, Lieutenant Waldheim won yet another medal: the German War Merit Cross, Second Class, with Swords, ‘awarded for especially meritorious service in the zone of enemy action or for exceptional services in furthering the war effort.’
An Army Group E duty roster dated 1 December 1943 lists First Lieutenant Waldheim’s other responsibilities:
Signing the morning and evening daily intelligence reports to certify their correctness – and sometimes drafting them, too – based on information he received from the field and from his assistants . . .
Personnel matters – including assessing the ‘political reliability’ of officers and enlisted men.
Prisoner interrogation.
And ‘special missions’ – a catch-all euphemism which, in the Third Reich, could cover an unimaginable multitude of sins.
Waldheim denies that he ever interrogated a prisoner – insisting that, if anybody were to do such work, it would have been the job of Major Hammer, who was the counter-intelligence officer. One of his assistants, as well as ex-Colonel Warnstorff, support his claim.
It should be said here that neither this book nor any of the many books about the Waldheim affair have come up with more than circumstantial evidence against Waldheim. Nor is it likely that any future investigation will unearth a ‘smoking gun’ of the make so aptly described by Michael Graff – general secretary of the Austrian People’s Party, whose presidential candidate Waldheim was in 1971 and 1986 – when he asserted in late 1987: ‘So long as it’s not proved he strangled six Jews with his own hands, no problem.’ Graff had to resign for what Simon Wiesenthal protested as ‘an insult to the worth of every Jew’, but his cynical perception of what Waldheim’s friends feared and foes hoped to find was deadly accurate.
The closest anyone has come to Graff’s prescription for hard evidence against his hero was when, in 1986, a survivor of the 1944 deportations of the 2000 Jews of the north-western Greek city of Ioannina swore he had seen his brother beaten on 24 March by a German officer he now identified as Kurt Waldheim; three other Ioannina deportees then came forth to testify that Lieutenant Waldheim had beaten them with a baton the next day in Larissa, where they were transferred from trucks to a train bound for Auschwitz. But Waldheim’s military records show that, on 23 February 1944, due to thyroid trouble that had been diagnosed in January, he was granted a medical leave to go back to Austria. On 1 March, he entered the Military Treatment Centre in the mountain spa of Semmering, fifty miles from his family’s home in Baden-bei-Wien, and was not released until 29 March.
While in Semmering, Waldheim put the finishing touches on his doctoral dissertation, which his fiancée – visiting him whenever she could free herself from her law classes in Vienna, sixty-five miles away – typed on a portable typewriter in a room at the nearby Hotel Panhans. Waldheim submitted his ninety-four-page thesis on Konstantin Frantz during his medical leave and, almost immediately, received a telegram from his professor: ‘DISSERTATION ACCEPTED. CONGRATULATIONS. VERDROSS’. It led to another extension of Waldheim’s leave – this time to receive his Doctor of Laws degree on Friday, 14 April 1944, at the University of Vienna, where his signature shows he accepted it personally. On the same day, his fiancée rejoined the Catholic Church. Two days later, Dr Kurt Waldheim returned to Arsakli.
His subsequent activities bear scrutiny, for the most formidable accusations lodged against him charge him with ‘murder’ and ‘putting hostages to death’ between April 1944 and May 1945. Astonishingly, these charges were contained in United Nations War Crimes Commission file number 79/724, a seven-page document which lay buried in the archives of UN headquarters in New York from 1948 to 1986, including the decade when Waldheim was at the helm of the world organization.
On 21 April 1944, right after Waldheim rejoined the intelligence command at Arsakli, Major Hammer issued a message estimating the number of Jews and foreigners on the Greek island of Corfu and ordering the Corps Group Ioannina to register them. On 28 April, the intelligence section of the Corps Group sent a letter to the intelligence command in Arsakli asking that the Nazi SD (Security Service) and Gestapo ‘bring about implementation measures . . . for the purpose of settlement of the Jewish question’ by ‘evacuating’ some 2000 Jews living on Corfu. On 12 May, General Löhr agreed to ‘furnish transportation for an accelerated evacuation of the Jews.’ On 17 June, the SS reported that 1795 Jews on Corfu had been ‘seized and transported from the island’ to Auschwitz, where most of them died.
Both April communications are reprinted in full in ‘The White Book’ (though not translated from German in its English version) and cited as clarification that, at Arsakli, deportations were dealt with exclusively by Major Hammer, the counter-intelligence officer, and not by Waldheim as a military intelligence officer.
Back on 7 April 1944, while Waldheim was still in Austria on his extended medical leave, a British ‘Special Boat Squadron’ of seven commandos and three Greek partisans – who had set out in a fishing boat flying a Turkish flag to raid the German-held Aegean islands of Khalki and Alimnia – were captured in a gun battle with a German patrol boat. T
hey and their vessel were taken to the Greek island of Rhodes. The fishing boat’s high-powered radio was a prize catch for German intelligence, which was able to monitor British marine and naval communications in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean areas for several days before the British realized it was in enemy hands. The prisoners were sent on to Salonika for a fortnight of questioning – but not by Waldheim.
The interrogators sent what they had learned up the hill to Arsakli, where their report arrived on 24 April and was acknowledged with Waldheim’s initial on the ‘received’ stamp. This is as far as Waldheim’s involvement can be documented. Two days later, the intelligence section in Arsakli cabled the Commander-in-Chief South East in Belgrade that further interrogations would be ‘fruitless’ and to ‘request decision whether prisoners now to be delivered to the SD’, which meant torture, execution, or both. Six of the commandos were executed that spring. The only survivor of their ill-fated mission was the captain of the raiding party, who had been sent directly from Rhodes to a POW camp in Germany well before the death decrees were passed from Belgrade via Arsakli.
Late at night on 1 July, another British commando raid – this one on the island of Calino – met with similar results. The Germans took three prisoners: two wounded Britons and an American medic. The two Englishmen were flown to Athens, where one of them, a Private Fishwick, died in hospital. The other, a sergeant named John Dryden, disappeared after being ‘handed over to the SD in compliance with the Führer Order’ of 18 October 1942 that captured Allied commandos were not to be allowed to surrender, but must be ‘eliminated to the last man’ – either right away or after interrogation. This post-mortem on John Dryden, dated 18 July 1944, bears Waldheim’s initial.
The third captive – James Doughty, twenty-six, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, serving with the Royal Medical Corps – was taken to Salonika and interrogated, but was not turned over to the SD. Respecting his status as an unarmed non-combatant, the Germans shipped him to a POW camp in Germany. Doughty lived to contradict Waldheim in 1986, when the Austrian presidential candidate contended that ‘there were no POW or partisan interrogations carried out at the Army Group command in Arsakli.’ For Arsakli was precisely where Doughty was interrogated in July 1944, his lawyer told the World Jewish Congress almost forty-two years later. And the intelligence unit’s monthly activity report for July 1944 – initialled by Waldheim – lists among its achievements ‘interrogation of prisoners of the Anglo-American mission in Greece.’
This boast, like the various other initiallings, in no way implies involvement by Waldheim. Two British investigations of these and other commando cases have upheld him. In 1986, the Foreign Secretary declared that there was no ‘evidence of any criminal activity on the part of Lieutenant Waldheim in relation to those men’ and, three years later, the Ministry of Defence affirmed that ‘the then Lieutenant Waldheim was a mere junior staff officer. There is no evidence . . . of any causative, overt act or omission from which his guilt of a war crime may be inferred.’
British and American captives were, however, few and far between. The daily briefings of General Löhr or a deputy were more immediate concerns of Lieutenant Waldheim’s. German military documents which the World Jewish Congress found slumbering in the US National Archives in Washington show that Lieutenant Waldheim briefed Löhr’s second-in-command, General Erich Schmidt-Richberg, on ‘the situation in the Mediterranean, Italy, and the Balkans’ on 20 May 1944, at a meeting that also discussed ‘effective’ use of hostages on a train in the Peloponnesus, mainland Greece’s southern peninsula, ‘to ensure the security of rail transport.’ To discourage the Greek resistance from firing upon or sabotaging trains under German control, the Germans would round up Greek civilians and pack them into large cages that were attached to the fronts of trains. This exposed them to any gunfire, bombings, or derailments by their own partisans.
On 25 May 1944, Waldheim wrote a memorandum that was unearthed in 1987 in a Munich archive by Professor Herzstein (this time, not working for the World Jewish Congress, but for his own 1988 book, Waldheim: the Missing Years). It criticized indiscriminate killings in no uncertain terms:
The reprisal measures imposed in response to acts of sabotage and ambush have, despite their severity, failed to achieve any noteworthy success, since our own measures have been only transitory, so that the punished communities or territories soon have to be abandoned once more to the bands. On the contrary, exaggerated reprisal measures undertaken without a more precise examination of the objective situation have only caused embitterment and have been useful to the bands.
Though his stated objections were pragmatic rather than moral, this protest does Waldheim credit. But it also shows that the young lieutenant was indeed aware of what was going on. Historian Herzstein says that, in examining thousands of documents of the German forces in Greece, ‘I have seen few stronger protests of this kind, and then only from the pens of far more powerful men.’
On 13 June 1944, Waldheim briefed General Schmidt-Richberg on ‘the situation in the West, Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans’ at a meeting that also discussed civilian slave labour.
On 9 August 1944, Waldheim briefed General Schmidt-Richberg on ‘the far west, Italy, France, and the situation in the Balkans.’ There was also a discussion of the daily success of ‘Operation Viper’, a series of ruthless ‘cleansing operations’ in which whole villages were wiped out to intimidate resistance; some researchers suspect that ‘Viper’ was also a round-up of the last remaining Jews in southern Greece. The next day, General Löhr issued an order that partisan activity ‘must be retaliated in every case with shooting or hanging of hostages, destruction of the surrounding localities, etc.’
On the following day, Friday, 11 August, Lieutenant Waldheim’s evening intelligence report noted, ‘In Athens: several communists shot during raids’, and identified an area south of the port of Herakleion on the island of Crete as a centre of ‘bandit activity’, meaning partisan operations. Two days later, German forces launched a ‘cleansing’ operation south-west of Herakleion and reported (to the intelligence command in Arsakli) that they had ‘destroyed two bandit villages’ and ‘shot to death twenty hostages.’
It could be said (and has been said) that Waldheim’s intelligence function was to point a finger and other hands would pull the trigger. Three years later, his 11 August 1944 evening intelligence report would be read in open court by US prosecutors in Nuremberg as evidence in the war crimes trial of General Wilhelm List, the Belgrade-based commander-in-chief of the German Army in the Balkans, and eleven other German officers charged with mass murder of hostages and ‘reprisal’ destruction of hundreds of towns and villages during Operation Viper. List received a life sentence,77 but little or no attention was paid to the signature on just one of many incriminating documents; Kurt Waldheim, in 1947, mattered to barely a handful of people, all in Austria.
Those people – most of all, his fiancée – were waiting eagerly for his return from Greece on 15 August 1944, on ‘compassionate leave’ to wed. On Saturday the 19th, between Allied bombardments, Kurt Waldheim and Elisabeth Ritschel were married by Father Georg Plank beneath the green copper dome of Vienna’s baroque Karlskirche. When they set out for their honeymoon in the pilgrimage shrine and mountain resort of Mariazell, some ninety miles from Vienna, their train had hardly cleared the city when air-raid sirens sounded. ‘All the passengers were hustled off and we spent our wedding night in the crowded basement of die local railway station, listening to the bombs falling overhead,’ Waldheim writes in his memoirs, without hinting he was still a soldier then.
By late summer of 1944, the Axis had lost the war, but millions of lives were yet to be lost before certainty would become reality. With external enemies massing on the rim of the Third Reich’s Balkan boundaries, and internal enemies gathering strength, Hitler ordered General Löhr on 1 September to evacuate the Balkan Peninsula in order to mass German defences around Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and no
rthern Italy as buffers against invasion from south or east.
In the first week of September, a cable from Arsakli aborted the Waldheims’ honeymoon in Mariazell. Lieutenant Waldheim was summoned back to duty for Army Group E’s gradual withdrawal from Greece into Yugoslavia. While ending more than a fortnight ahead of schedule, all was not lost on this honeymoon that had begun with a bombardment and ended with a retreat. The bride returned to Vienna pregnant.
‘From Sept. 6 [1944] until the end of the year (after then, there are no documents) we find, almost without interruption, Waldheim’s signature or the initial W on the intelligence reports of Army Group E,’ writes Hanspeter Born, foreign editor of the Zurich weekly Die Weltwoche, in his 1987 study, Certified Correct: Kurt Waldheim. But it was not until 12 October, the day before Löhr and his staff transferred their headquarters from Arsakli to Kosovska Mitrovica in southern Yugoslavia, that Lieutenant Waldheim was implicated in events that led both the postwar United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes to accuse him of murder.
On Thursday, 12 October 1944, the lead item in Lieutenant Waldheim’s morning and evening intelligence reports noted a build-up of partisan activity along the thirty-five-mile stretch of winding road between the Yugoslavian towns of Stip and Kocani on the main route of Army Group E’s imminent withdrawal through Macedonia to its new base. The next day, Waldheim and Colonel Warnstorff flew to Kosovska Mitrovica in General Löhr’s plane. On Saturday, 14 October, late in the afternoon, most of Army Group E commenced the 200-mile road journey through a ghostly, ghastly moon landscape where corpses of partisans had been strung up as a warning message on every second telegraph pole. But no difficulties were encountered between Stip and Kocani.
