by Alan Levy
Kurt Waldheim was given a three-month probationary appointment as Provisional Attaché in the Chancellor’s Office’s Department of Foreign Affairs effective 1 December 1945. With his wife and daughter, he moved in with Cissy’s parents in bombed-out Vienna until they could find a flat of their own.
The denazification of Kurt Waldheim was a perfunctory affair throughout. Having been linked – however tenuously and largely by absorption – to the Nazi Student Union as well as the SA Cavalry Corps, he became Denazification Case SK235 in an administrative inquiry that the Allies had required to purge all former Nazis from the new Austrian administrative machinery.
Complete with character references from anti-Nazis and his negative 1940 Nazi evaluation plus a two-page personal statement in which he stressed the ‘sportslike’ character of his SA Cavalry Corps connection, the application Kurt Waldheim submitted on 25 January 1946 also contained one clear-cut mis-statement:
Finally, I would like to state that the grant from the Austrian Chamber of Industry and Commerce to attend the Consular Academy which I had received prior to March 1938 was cancelled as a result of my invariably pro-Austrian attitude and the dismissal of my father78 which had resulted from the National Socialist seizure of power.
In reality, the 200-schilling grant was one of four held up after the Anschluss for review of the nominees’ Aryan and Nazi credentials. Two of them were replaced by Nazi activists, but the other two, Kurt Waldheim and Hans Schernhorst, were sustained. Waldheim received his grant two months after the Anschluss.
Early in 1946, the Austrian government’s Ministerial Committee for Denazification was given three months (later extended to 30 June) to investigate the wartime pasts of 13,000 federal employees ranging from janitors to Cabinet ministers. By 29 June, when the committee had resolved not quite half its caseload and had not yet taken up SK235, the Foreign Ministry took matters into its own hands. It simply retrieved Waldheim’s dossier and appointed him to the Austrian Foreign Service as a career diplomat, retroactive to 1 June. In November 1946, he was formally notified that he was neither subject to any penalties arising from former Nazi affiliations nor required to register with the government as a former Nazi.
To Simon Wiesenthal, who opposes the concepts of collective guilt and collective innocence, the perfunctory denazification of postwar Austria ‘was almost a case of collective amnesia.’ In this regard, if in no other, Kurt Waldheim was a particularly ordinary Austrian. He began practising the art of forgetting as early as mid-1946, when Gruber was preparing to represent Austria at a crucial January 1947 meeting in London of the Deputy Foreign Ministers of the Big Four powers occupying his country. High on the agenda were Yugoslavia’s claims to parts of southern Carinthia which Tito’s partisan army had ‘liberated’ bloodily in the last days of the war in Europe, only to be chased away when British troops arrived. As he and Gruber cast about for experts to serve in the delegation, Waldheim, though eager to see England for the first time, never mentioned his own wartime experience in Yugoslavia.
Waldheim went anyway – newly promoted to the rank of Legation Secretary, which qualified him for future assignment to an Austrian embassy abroad. As the delegates convened in London, the Austrians were greeted with a well-orchestrated Yugoslavian propaganda campaign against them. Waldheim’s military superior, General Löhr, was put on trial in Belgrade for atrocities committed by Army Group E. Reminding the Four Powers that Löhr was an Austrian, the Yugoslavs in London accused Austria of having fought on Hitler’s side and having forcibly ‘Germanized’ thousands of Slovenes living in Austria’s southernmost province, Carinthia. Not only did Tito’s team attack Austria for protecting war criminals and rehabilitating Nazis, but, on 30 January, they denounced a star member of Gruber’s delegation – Hans Piesch, the Socialist governor of Carinthia – as a Nazi collaborator and demanded his expulsion from the conference.
Having cleared and worked with him, the British and the Americans angrily defended Piesch, but the Russians insisted upon a full investigation in Austria. To make matters worse, British investigators soon learned that Piesch had indeed worked for the Nazis as an official of Heinrich Himmler’s Office for Race and Settlement. Piesch was forced to resign his governorship.
Bogged down in Balkan crossfire, the deputies’ conference dissolved in late February with no decision reached. The next round would be the Big Four Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow at the end of March. In the meantime, Yugoslavia convicted and executed General Löhr as a war criminal, but, still respecting his military status, honoured his request to be shot instead of hanged.
In Moscow in 1947, the chief of Tito’s delegation, Edvard Kardelj, renewed the attack on Austria by claiming that more than eighty of Hitler’s generals had been Austrians and the execution of General Löhr should be just the beginning of compliance with 1943’s Moscow Declaration. Austria was also a refuge for Ustashi and other Yugoslavian Nazis, said Kardelj, who declared that ‘Austria should deliver all war criminals and traitors to the nation that was the victim of their crimes or treason.’ The conference ended on 24 April 1947, with no decision on the territorial question that was really at issue.
In the summer of 1947, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry in Belgrade, studying the personnel rosters of General Löhr’s Army Group E, recognized that the Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim on Löhr’s intelligence staff was the same tall, quiet young man now sitting at Austrian Foreign Minister Gruber’s side whenever he fought off Yugoslavia’s territorial claims in London and Moscow. Around the same time, Captain Egberts-Hilker was hanged in Belgrade for the 1944 massacres of 114 villagers in the German response to Lieutenant Waldheim’s intelligence reports of partisan activity on the road between Stip and Kocani. And the Yugoslavs discovered that sitting in their Kalvarija-Zemun POW camp was former Army Group E personnel clerk Johann Mayer, who already had the status of an informer. To further ingratiate himself with his captors and hasten his return to Vienna, Mayer stood ready to accuse Lieutenant Waldheim of everything from ordering murders to being a pre-1938 illegal Nazi.
Seeing that they were having no luck prying Ustashi fugitives loose from Austria, the Yugoslavs decided to take their case against Waldheim to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) in London. But UNWCC was one of the first casualties of the Cold War: because the US and the Soviet Union were unwilling to share intelligence with each other and reluctant to entrust information to a neutral body that might share it, the Commission was due to die on 31 March 1948. It would not consider any cases submitted after 31 December 1947. With this deadline in mind, on 12 December, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry prodded the Foreign Ministry ‘to make a decision on Gruber’s assistant, Lieutenant Waldheim, on the basis of which he could be registered by the United Nations War Crimes Commission’ and ‘bear in mind that the deadline for such registration will expire at the end of this year.’
Around that time, Anton Kolendic, deputy director of the Yugoslav military delegation in Vienna, received a secret list from Belgrade of thirty ‘war criminals’ living in Austria. Kolendic was surprised to see the name of Kurt Waldheim, with whom he had frequent contact, fourth on the list, heavily underlined, but was unable to contribute more to the investigation than the fact that Waldheim had never even mentioned to him that he’d served in Yugoslavia during the war.
‘I looked carefully through his file because it was unusually detailed,’ Kolendic recalled in 1986 to Dusko Doder of the Washington Post. ‘We’d had such lists and files coming all the time, but, in the vast majority of cases, documentation was short and weak. We’d never had such a well-documented file before. At least, I don’t remember seeing one.’
As instructed by Belgrade, Kolendic passed the secret list on to his Soviet counterpart, a Colonel Gonda. So it is certain that Russia knew at least a fragment of the truth Kurt Waldheim was concealing, which made him blackmailable by Soviet intelligence. And Kolendic, at least, is ‘absolutely sure’ the Russians approached Waldheim. ‘When you are in
the intelligence business,’ he told Doder, ‘you have a way of knowing such things. I dealt with Gonda regularly and we became quite friendly.’
‘No such attempt perceivable to Dr Waldheim was made,’ presidential spokesman Gerold Christian tried to assure Doder in late 1986. ‘Dr Waldheim was never approached by any country in a manner implied by your question.’ Groping for confirmation, Doder could only quote an unnamed ‘former intelligence operative who held the rank of colonel in the Yugoslav secret police at the time’ and said that, in early 1948, the Russians told Colonel Boro Leontic, a Yugoslav intelligence liaison man, that ‘Waldheim was recruited and the Yugoslavs should stop their interference.’ Colonel Leontic could not be located thirty-eight years later.
On 18 December 1947, the Yugoslav State Commission for the Determination of Crimes Committed by the Occupying Forces and their Collaborators indicted Kurt Waldheim for ‘murders and slaughters, executions of hostages, [and] wanton destruction and arson’, holding him responsible for ‘preparing, issuing, and acting upon criminal orders while his group operated in Yugoslavia.’ The seven-page indictment concluded that:
Lieutenant [Kurt] Waldheim is a war criminal responsible for the war crimes described and assessed above.
Placing this war criminal under arrest is obligatory under the terms of Article 4 Paragraph V of the Yugoslav law on criminal activities against the people and the State, and his surrender to the Yugoslav authorities for trial is obligatory under the terms of the Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943.
Eight days later, the chairman of the commission informed the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry that it had declared Waldheim, ‘at this time on the staff of the Austrian Minister Dr Gruber’, a war criminal and asked it to lodge the indictment with UNWCC in London ‘emphasizing the special importance we attach to this registration.’
Despite their demand for Waldheim’s extradition, this was not the Yugoslavs’ real aim. They wanted to plant a time-bomb they could explode at the next Big Four ministers’ conference to embarrass Gruber the way they had with their accusations against Governor Piesch of Carinthia. With this in mind, their goal was to persuade UNWCC to put Waldheim on its ‘A’ list of alleged war criminals for whom there was good reason to assume that, if tried, they would be convicted.
While the Yugoslav delegation to UNWCC was translating the indictment against Waldheim into English for a hearing in February, the same UNWCC committee that would rule on Waldheim denied a Yugoslav request to put a former German Army intelligence officer, a Lieutenant Hanzer, on the ‘A’ list because just the job was not proof of a war crime in the absence of actual participation. Recognizing that this ruling would weaken their case against Waldheim, the Yugoslavs altered Johann Mayer’s testimony that some German Army deserters were executed on orders from Army Group E’s intelligence section (with the concurrence of the chief of staff, General Schmidt-Richberg, and General Löhr himself) to ‘They were executed according to the order given by Waldheim.’ Similarly, testimony by Löhr’s aide-de-camp, Major Mellinghoff, that reprisals against civilians were taken ‘on the basis of the highest orders. This is also valid for the sphere of activity of Section Ic’ (the intelligence section in which Waldheim worked) was altered to ‘by the German general staff and high-ranking German officers. The same line of action was taken by the accused’ (= Waldheim).
At that time, the people bent on incriminating Waldheim at all costs of truth had no notion that he had been at Kozara and close to the powers behind still other atrocities. Says historian Herzstein succinctly, if pejoratively: ‘They framed the right guy.’
At its final session on 26 February 1948, attended by British and American representatives, Committee I of UNWCC placed Kurt Waldheim on its seventy-ninth ‘A’ list of wanted war-crimes suspects: one of 37,000 names on what would be a total of eighty lists. Despite their keen interest in Waldheim, the Yugoslavs presented his file with eleven other cases and didn’t hint that they knew where this fugitive from their justice was living and working. Another seventy-two Czech, Dutch, and Greek cases were submitted at the same session, so it is unlikely that the Waldheim dossier received more than a minute or two’s cursory attention. A month later, just before going out of business, the full United Nations War Crimes Commission approved the committee’s last lists.
In April, the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, which assisted in the apprehension of war criminals, received the UNWCC lists from London and routinely added Waldheim’s name to its index of 69,000 wanted war criminals, suspects, and witnesses. Though the Yugoslavs rejoiced because, back in May 1945, the Allies had decreed automatic extradition for anyone whose name appeared on the CROWCASS list, they made no effort to tell the hunters of war criminals where Waldheim could be found. Their time-bomb was still ticking . . .
But it was not destined to detonate at the Big Four ministers’ conferences of 1949 – or for another thirty-eight years. Dislike between Stalin and Tito had widened into a breach that led Stalin to expel Yugoslavia’s communist party from the Cominform79 in June and impose an economic blockade by the communist world. This, in turn, left Yugoslavia with four opponents in the Big Four and a need to woo its Western neighbours, including occupied Austria, for closer economic ties. Such nasty issues as territory and war criminals were dropped from the table and, in fact, Yugoslavia informed Austria that all her POWs would be repatriated by the end of the year. Among them was the Yugoslavs’ key living witness against Waldheim, Johann Mayer, released on 22 July 1948.
There was a more immediate reason, however, why Yugoslavia didn’t explode its Waldheim bombshell at the ministerial meetings. Once again, with the luck and agility that lifted him to higher plateaus whenever the ground beneath him started to crumble, Waldheim was The Man Who Wasn’t There. For, on 14 January 1948, Gruber had granted his request to be reassigned as First Secretary of the Austrian Legation in Paris, where Gerhard Waldheim was born three months later.
‘Dr Herzstein tried very hard in his book to say that I was transferred from Vienna to Paris because the Austrian government was afraid the Yugoslavs would ask for my extradition,’ President Kurt Waldheim told me ruefully in 1989. ‘I tried to convince him that this was not so, because Dr Gruber didn’t know what was happening with my file or even that there was one – and neither did I. Besides, if they had really wanted to extradite me to Yugoslavia, it would have been easier to get me from Paris than from Vienna.’
After three happy years in Paris, Waldheim was recalled to Vienna to head the Foreign Ministry’s personnel department. His new job gave him access to and control over every employee’s records, including his own.
Though bureaucrats throughout history have used that power to settle scores and blackmail rivals or superiors, Waldheim might have had other aims. ‘It was around this time,’ writes Herzstein, ‘that a vague grey mist began to descend over Kurt Waldheim’s past – when the crucial years between 1941 and 1945 seemed to go missing. Among other things, it became apparent in the early 1950s that Waldheim’s doctoral dissertation on Konstantin Frantz had disappeared from the library of the University of Vienna . . . The disappearance of Waldheim’s dissertation was consistent with a pattern of omission that was coming to characterize Waldheim’s way of dealing with his war years. Waldheim rarely, if ever, actually lied about what he had done during the war; he simply neglected to mention the awkward parts.’ By 1952, his official biography contained not a word about his ever having been in the military.
In the autumn of 1955 – thanks to negotiations led by Bruno Kreisky as Secretary of State, which, in Austria, means the chief civil servant in the Foreign Ministry – the Four-Power postwar occupation ended and the newly independent nation of Austria was admitted to the United Nations. Leading its first three-man delegation into the General Assembly Hall was thirty-six-year-old Kurt Waldheim.
Early in 1968, Austria’s ambassador to the United Nations was presiding over a lun
cheon meeting of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space at his residence on Manhattan’s East Side when he was summoned to the library to take a transatlantic phone call from his Chancellor, Josef Klaus. As he left the room, Kurt Waldheim heard the American delegate remark: ‘Either he is going to be dismissed or be appointed Foreign Minister.’
After a brief discussion with his wife, Cissy, Waldheim accepted the job, ‘convinced that I had now reached the peak of my career’ at the age of forty-nine.
In his two years as Foreign Minister, Waldheim strengthened neighbourly relations with Yugoslavia by cultivating a personal friendship with Marshal Tito, who invited him often to his island residence of Brioni and presented him with the Order of the Grand Cross of the Yugoslav Flag. As biographer Herzstein points out: ‘Waldheim had now been decorated by the Fascist Pavelic and the Communist Tito; he was indeed a flexible man.’
There had been much wrangling about whether Tito knew that he was negotiating with, entertaining, decorating, and, later, supporting for UN Secretary General a man wanted for murder in Yugoslavia – and, if so, why he went on with it. In the mid-1960s, Tito’s government had purchased many reels of captured German military documents from the US National Archives and, in 1967, had updated its Waldheim file from them.
