by Alan Levy
Tito’s son, Misha Broz, is sure his father knew about his new friend’s past, but considered Waldheim’s wartime actions inconsequential. Tito’s long-time chief of staff, Mirko Milutinovic, confirmed that ‘I knew Waldheim had been compromised’, but added that ‘Tito did not regard Waldheim as a war criminal.’ Other experts – aware of Tito’s remoteness, communism’s bureaucracies, and Yugoslavia’s decentralization of paperwork – find it plausible that the Waldheim dossier could have eluded the dictator’s notice. Still others suspect that, after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Tito gave his highest priority to building up relations with Austria as a bulwark against another blitzkrieg.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the tallest man in Austria was neither Chancellor Klaus nor his six-foot-three Foreign Minister Waldheim, but five-foot-eight Bruno Kreisky, who had been out of office almost four years. The Austrian public had grown to like and respect him when he was playing key roles in coalition governments and negotiating the occupying armies (particularly the Red Army) out of Austria in 1955. Now, in opposition, they had come to trust and miss him. No People’s Party politician, larger or smaller, measured up to Kreisky’s stature.
In the national election of 1970, when Kreisky was elected Chancellor, there was no place for Kurt Waldheim in a Socialist Cabinet. But Waldheim was offered his UN position back. No sooner did he return to work in New York, however, than he took a leave of absence and went back to Austria when the People’s Party asked him to run for President in 1971 against the ailing, but ever-popular, seventy-one-year-old Socialist incumbent, Franz Jonas. Waldheim’s posters then, as in 1986, proclaimed him as ‘THE MAN THE WORLD TRUSTS’. But, with Austrian socialism swept forward by Kreisky’s new broom, Waldheim was foredoomed to defeat. Still, his 47.2 per cent slice of the vote surpassed even his own expectations and he returned to New York with more prestige than before: a familiar silhouette now in strong contention for UN Secretary General should U Thant not seek a third term at the end of 1971.
‘The trouble with the Waldheims is that they are too good to be true,’ Time correspondent Traudl Lessing would write from Vienna a few months later, when U Thant’s health ruled out the Burmese’s re-election. ‘Waldheim’s election committee during the presidential campaign put out the most insipid stories about the candidate’s shaking of rough workers’ hands to make the polished Dr Waldheim come to life. There are no anecdotes, there are no dark spots. From 1939 to 1945, Dr Waldheim “never took part in active politics.” As a Foreign Minister in a People’s Party government and as People’s Party candidate for President, he never joined the party, but remained aloof and independent. Truly, he is the man who is always there, ready to serve, willing to negotiate, but never ready to rush into battle.’ Not for another fifteen years would Waldheim recast himself as The Man Who Was Never There.
It was Bruno Kreisky who put forth Kurt Waldheim for Secretary General and activated his Socialist and Third World contacts to push his candidacy. For Kreisky recognized that, as a pair of French biographers of Waldheim put it, ‘the man would be useful to him. He [Kreisky] was sufficiently familiar with the world to know that a diplomat of Waldheim’s type, with neither the personality nor the ability to make his personal mark, can sometimes prove to be more useful than a Metternich, especially when one is representing a small country of negligible importance on the world scene.’
The invasion of neighbouring Czechoslovakia had alarmed Kreisky to such an extent that he hoped having an Austrian at the head of the UN might give the Russians second thoughts about violating Austrian sovereignty. As it turned out, Waldheim would go this one or two better by making Vienna the world’s third official UN city (after New York and Geneva) in 1979 and, with Kreisky’s co-operation, planting a huge new concave orange-striped eyesore of an edifice complex for UN agencies on the shore of the Danube: enough to make even the Red Army of the Brezhnev era think thrice before swooping.
The UN Secretary General is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council, where each of the Big Five – Britain, China, France, Russia, and the US – has veto power. The Soviets supported Gunnar Jarring of Sweden, a former ambassador to Moscow, but others ruled him out early because two of the first three Secretary Generals had been Scandinavians (Trygve Lie of Norway and Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden). China wanted another Oriental to succeed U Thant. The Americans supported Max Jakobson of Finland: a Socialist activist, journalist, and pro-Israel Jew who faced a sure Soviet veto. ‘Our Arab friends in the General Assembly,’ said a Soviet delegate, ‘would never vote for a Jew.’
Only France favoured Waldheim from the outset – because he spoke French. But he quickly became almost everybody’s second choice. Waldheim invited the Soviet delegate, Jacob Malik, to lunch and found him talking ‘in rather friendly terms about my candidacy, although he would not commit himself. A few days later, I received a clue to the Soviet attitude when he invited me back to lunch.’ George Bush, then the US ambassador to the UN, termed Waldheim ‘ideally equipped’ for the job, which Bush’s deputy, Seymour Maxwell Finger, elaborated to mean that ‘no one saw him as a man of principle. We believed him to be an opportunist, but in the 1970s we wanted a Secretary General who would be malleable.’ In Peking, Kreisky’s ambassador, Hans Thalberg, without ever mentioning Waldheim by name, lobbied in a low key with Chou En-lai for China to abstain rather than veto.
After the second ballot, only Jakobson and Waldheim were left in contention, but the Russians vetoed Jakobson and then China changed its mind about Waldheim. On Tuesday, 21 December 1971 – Waldheim’s fifty-third birthday – the Security Council recommended that he be elected Secretary General. Oddly, of all the Western nations, only Britain abstained. The next day, the General Assembly ratified the choice.
‘An odourless, colourless diplomat was required, and the criteria for the choice were specific,’ a high UN official told Waldheim biographers Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen. But, on the day Waldheim was elected, one young Israeli television journalist, Haim Yavin, smelled a rat when a member of the Austrian delegation whispered to him that Waldheim had a Nazi past. Having just been granted a five-minute interview, Yavin asked Waldheim point-blank: ‘Did you have any links with the Nazi Party? Were you a Party member?’
Waldheim gave a big smile and shook his head, saying: ‘No links of any kind. On the contrary, my family had many problems during the Nazi period. My father was a teacher and a resolute anti-Nazi – as we all were: my brother and sister as well. My father was fired from his teaching post and thrown in jail. So you can be certain that there was no reason to cherish even the slightest friendly sentiment toward the Nazis. On the contrary, we suffered under their domination.’
‘When did you hear about the Holocaust and what had been done to the Jews?’ Yavin asked Waldheim.
‘Well, I had Jewish friends when I was in high school. Some of them live in New York and have been in touch with me. I was deeply moved when I heard about that sort of thing and couldn’t believe it. But there was not much we could do.’ Yes, he had served as a German officer on the Russian front, but, after being wounded in 1941, ‘the good Lord helped me and I was sent back home to resume my studies.’ He concluded by reminding Yavin that nobody lifted a finger when Austria was occupied by the Nazis in 1938: ‘The people who criticize us today ought to remember the call for help to Austria at the time of the Anschluss.’
When his interview was aired in Israel that night, Yavin ‘felt as though the sky had fallen in on me and that I had done something terrible. The broadcasting authorities and the newspapers were furious with me for having dared to put such unpleasant questions to such a friendly man.’ Recalling the episode in 1986, Yavin, by then Director of Israeli Television, said the Foreign Ministry feared that such aggressive questioning might jeopardize Austria’s processing of Soviet Jews emigrating through Vienna, even though the Chancellor of Austria in 1971 was Jewish.
One of George Bush’s successors
at the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, told Bush he would have much preferred Max Jakobson: ‘Our candidate was a Socialist Jew, but instead we installed a German infantry officer.’ Moynihan spoke hyperbole, for Waldheim never amounted to more in the war than a cavalry officer turned desk jockey. But, for the next decade, that low-level German lieutenant would be sitting on top of the world.
37
The man at the top
As Secretary General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim quickly came face to face-with the ‘Jewish Problem’ he had sidestepped in Salonika and Austria, Russia and the Balkans. A bland speech in Montreal early in his tenure was interrupted and enlivened by a young man who stood up and read a petition asking what the UN was doing on behalf of the emigration of Soviet Jews. The Secretary General simply stood still and silent until detectives came and dragged the man from the hall, still demanding an answer. Waldheim’s reply came only after his heckler was gone. ‘So you see,’ he told his audience primly, ‘my job is not as easy as it seems.’ Then he resumed reading his set speech.
A different kind of distancing took place in September 1973, when Waldheim paid an official visit to Israel and was taken, as all visitors are, to place a wreath on the Yad Vashem memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust. While Yad Vashem is not a place of worship, male visitors are expected to cover their heads, just as in a synagogue, when they enter the ‘Tent of Remembrance’, where an eternal flame burns in semi-darkness. Twice offered yarmulkahs (skull-caps), Waldheim declined the first and stuck the second into his pocket. According to his escort, Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner, ‘Waldheim was the first visitor to Yad Vashem ever to have refused to cover his head during this ceremony.’
To Jewish eyes and ears around the world, Kurt Waldheim’s two terms at the helm of the United Nations coincided with the ascendancy of the Third World and an anti-Israel bias; the image of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat addressing the General Assembly in 1974 while wearing a revolver holster and bullets; and, above all, the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. Even though Waldheim openly opposed that resolution as doing ‘serious damage to the image of the United Nations’, fought to put terrorism on the General Assembly agenda after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, and resisted numerous Third World initiatives, he was perceived and judged by what often transpired despite him in his era. ‘The Secretary General of the United Nations is faced with one simple truth,’ Waldheim said. ‘He has no executive power . . . All I have is moral power. I have nothing behind me. I can write letters to people, I can speak personally to governments, but I have not got the power to force anyone to do anything.’ Too often, however, the messenger was equated with the message.
The Third World, in fact, had turned on Waldheim with a vengeance and, through its one superpower, China, was able to veto any possibility of a third term as his mandate ran out in 1981. Long before then, however, hints about his past began to surface in print. As early as 25 August 1973, in the New York Times Book Review, Shirley Hazzard mentioned Waldheim’s having been ‘an officer in Hitler’s army on the Russian front’ and was chastized by a UN spokesman for having made ‘a very injurious accusation’, however true. One of Waldheim’s first and most persistent critics, Hazzard, an Australian-born novelist, elaborated upon Waldheim’s past in the 19 January 1980 issue of the Washington magazine The New Republic, by alleging that Waldheim had ‘taken part in the Nazi youth movement and served in Hitler’s army in various campaigns including the Eastern front.’ The New Republic’s editor, Martin Peretz, repeated the accusation in his 27 September issue.
Then, on 9 October 1980, Dr Hillel Seidman, a right-wing Zionist author and activist in his eighties who had survived the Nazi camps, went to a Waldheim press conference at the UN and asked him specifically whether he had been a member of the Nazi Student Union and the SA: precisely the first charges that would surface on the front pages five and a half years later. The Secretary General replied blundy: ‘That’s nonsense!’ – and, when Seidman went on to allege in addition that, while serving on the Russian front, Lieutenant Waldheim had played a role in the extermination of Eastern Jews, the other journalists present dismissed him as a crank.
Back in 1980, Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York had read enough to write to the Secretary General on 26 November asking about Shirley Hazzard’s accusations. That was when Waldheim replied:
It would be odd, to say the least, if the government of the United States and all the member governments voted twice to elect me as Secretary General of the United Nations if they had been in doubt as to my character and background
and, after assuring Solarz that these ‘slanderous’ rumours were a ‘McCarthyesque lie’, added that his omission of his 1942–5 military service in the Balkans was not meant to mislead: ‘All I said was that after my wound I was no longer fit for service at the front. I meant to say that I could not be sent back to the Russian front.’
Retiring with honour from the UN in early 1982 on a pension of $83,000 a year (tax free), he taught a term as Distinguished Guest Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, where he also dictated his memoirs to two research assistants working with 200 boxes of files he took with him. Then he returned to Austria, where, outside the Hotel Imperial, he was promptly knocked down by a streetcar. Waldheim was treated for shock and bruises in a hospital. And a quip around town was: ‘That’s what happens when you live in limousines. You no longer know how to cross the street.’
Repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at the UN, Waldheim gave lectures in Europe and America and talked of visiting the four countries to which his career hadn’t taken him: ‘Bolivia, Swaziland, Western New Guinea, and Botswana.’ But when he started addressing colleagues and former subordinates in the familiar ‘Du’ form instead of the formal ‘Sie’, it soon became clear he had a nearer destination in mind: the Presidential Chancellery at the Ballhausplatz end of the Hofburg, the Winter Palace of the Habsburgs.
President Kirchschläger’s second term would be expiring in 1986 and he wasn’t permitted to try for a third. In the spring of 1985, the opposition People’s Party asked Waldheim to be its presidential candidate again, as he had been in 1971. Waldheim said he would think it over.
Kurt Waldheim announced his candidacy in September 1985. From Lake Neusiedl on the Iron Curtain with Hungary to Lake Constance on the Swiss and German borders 500 miles to the west, Austria was blanketed with posters showing Waldheim at the UN or meeting with world leaders, or else Kurt and Cissy wearing their loden against a mountain backdrop – and the recurrent slogan: ‘VOTE FOR A MAN THE WORLD TRUSTS’.
Unable to coax the ageing, ailing ex-Chancellor Bruno Kreisky out of retirement to die in office (‘I want to save the country the cost of a State funeral,’ he declared in declining), the Socialists put forth as their presidential candidate Dr Kurt Steyrer, a decent dermatologist who had been Minister of Health and Environment since 1981 under Kreisky and his successor, Fred Sinowatz. As Steyrer spoke of lowering unemployment, increasing pensions, and improving health care, one could feel and see the crowds wilting from disenchantment with fifteen years of socialism, which, entrenched in power, was reeling from scandals involving doctored wine, high-level insurance and tax frauds, and the hypocrisy of governing in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party of ex-SS man Friedrich Peter since 1983. This had brought into Sinowatz’s cabinet a boyish Defence Minister with the Wagnerian name of Friedhelm Frischenschlager, who, in early 1985, embarrassed Austria by flying to Graz to give a red-carpet welcome (and Austrian citizenship back) to SS Major Walter Reder when Italy released its last war criminal from life imprisonment for massacring the villages of Marzabotto (1830 dead) and Lunigiana (1200 dead) in 1944.
It was Frischenschlager, too, who gave the Socialists the opening they thought would torpedo Waldheim’s candidacy in a matter of days. Early in 1985, the daughter of executed General Löhr persuaded Frischenschlager to h
onour her father with a commemorative plaque on the house where he’d lived in Vienna. In making her case, she pointed out that, after all, Kurt Waldheim had been his adjutant. Frischenschlager was impressed; like many Austrians of all party affiliations, he took this as exoneration of Löhr, not implication of Waldheim.
Honouring Löhr infuriated a Viennese historian named Georg Tidl, who went to see Michael Graff, general secretary of the People’s Party, in April 1985 to tell him that their potential candidate was linked to a war criminal. Graff brushed off Tidl with disbelief and the nonchalance of a politician who would eventually find ‘no problem’ with Waldheim ‘so long as it’s not proved he strangled six Jews with his own hands.’
Tidl did some more homework and, early in 1986, dug up parts of Lieutenant Waldheim’s military career file. When he phoned Wiesenthal, Simon says Tidl asked for help in proving that the German Army division with which Waldheim was wounded in Russia in 1941 had been incorporated into an SS division in 1945, which Tidl insisted (according to Wiesenthal) would make Waldheim an SS man. Wondering at this logic, Wiesenthal nonetheless checked his files and found no record of such a merger.
When Frischenschlager allowed some Air Force officers to hang another plaque honouring General Löhr on a wall of the National Defence Academy in Vienna, Tidl took his research to the Socialist Party. Sensing that their candidate, Steyrer, was slipping behind Waldheim, the Socialists listened and, apparently, bought Tidl’s story. Rather than attack Waldheim fiontally with it and risk losing the votes of the ‘formers’ (as ex-Nazis are still called in Austria), they leaked it to the World Jewish Congress in New York.
