by Alan Levy
Word of Tidl’s work focused the attention of Hubertus Czernin, a profil magazine reporter, on the gaps in Waldheim’s public war record. Czernin called the candidate and asked for his permission to look up his military files in the State Archives in the interest of dispelling all the gossip that was going around. Waldheim obliged graciously, says Czernin, and dispatched his secretary to assist the journalist with the necessary clearances and clarifications.
In the archives, Czernin found not just Waldheim’s complete military career record, but details of his affiliations with the SA riding club and Nazi student union. When he went to see Waldheim about them, however, the candidate simply smiled and shook his head, saying, ‘No, not me, not true.’ Unable to elicit any more concrete answers at that evening meeting, Czernin went out to a café with two Waldheim aides – press secretary Gerold Christian and chief of staff Peter Marboe. They sat until one in the morning. Recalling that night, Czernin told Jane Kramer of the New Yorker how he exclaimed to Christian and Marboe: ‘Wow! Waldheim must have had terrific contacts to be able to stay in Vienna and study law for two whole years in the middle of a world war.’
Marboe and Christian were so alarmed by Czernin’s intimations that he says ‘they went back to Waldheim, and then Waldheim said, “Well, maybe I was only sick for two months, and maybe then I went to the Balkans.” But the thing is, he would never tell the whole story and this was very annoying, because it turned out that he was one of the best-informed officers in the Balkans. He knew everything.’
Czernin published his first exposé of Waldheim in profil on 3 March 1986. The next day, the New York Times carried a front-page story by John Tagliabue of its Bonn bureau. Datelined Vienna, it appeared under the headline: ‘FILES SHOW KURT WALDHEIM SERVED UNDER WAR CRIMINAL’. Tagliabue wrote that his details came not just from profil, but from the World Jewish Congress, ‘and were corroborated independently by The Times.’ His story continued on to most of an inside page, which also contained the famous photo of Lieutenant Waldheim standing between Italian General Roncaglia and German SS General Phleps.
Tagliabue wrote that Waldheim, ‘visibly shaken’, told him: ‘I regret these things most deeply, but I have to repeat that it is really the first time that I hear that such things happened. I never heard or learned anything of this while I was there. I hear for the first time that there were deportations from there.’
Though this disclaimer, oft repeated, would do more to destroy Waldheim’s credibility than any other single episode in the daily flood of revelations soon to follow, Tagliabue had the perception to suggest early ‘that the most serious accusation against him may ultimately turn out to be that he was not forthcoming about his past.’ Or, as Tidl put it: ‘The only thing behind the entire story is that Waldheim never volunteered any of this.’
Asked why he left his Balkan experience out of his 1985 autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm: A Memoir, Waldheim cited the opening words of his preface:
This is not a book of memoirs in the ordinary sense, nor is it a comprehensive account of events during my term of office as Secretary General of the United Nations. . .
Instead I have attempted to offer some insight into my background, actions, and aspirations. Without dwelling upon the routine and frustrations that are also the hallmarks of any arduous career, I have described those events and episodes which I feel bear some significance for the course of history.
Clearly, he did not yet consider his military career one of those. ‘I never said that my book made any claim to completeness,’ he told Tagliabue. ‘Otherwise it would have been so boring that no one would have read it.’
Simon Wiesenthal entered the Waldheim picture on 5 March 1986, with a statement that ‘I consider it highly unlikely that he was ever a member of a Nazi organization.’ As usual, Wiesenthal was not talking off the top of his head, for Tidl’s call had not been Simon’s first inquiry into Waldheim. Back in 1978, during the Secretary General’s second term in office, Israeli intelligence had asked Wiesenthal whether Waldheim had a ‘brown past’. Simon had said he had nothing on him in his files, but would check elsewhere. He called Berlin and asked his old friend and admirer, Axel Springer, the media mogul, to check out Waldheim with the two prime sources there: the American-controlled Berlin Documentation Centre (BDC), repository for SS files, and the French-controlled Wehrmacht Archive (WASt), a depository for all German Army records. The BDC’s standard report form is a checklist of sixteen Nazi organizations, starting with the SS and Nazi Party; Waldheim had belonged to none of the sixteen. A day later, WASt issued a seemingly clean bill of health, too – or, at least, a report that dwelled more on Waldheim’s ill health than on his active service:
1939: Taken into German Army and seconded to 45th Reconnaissance Section, cavalry squadron.
1941: Served with 1st Company of Reconnaissance Section 45; wounded in right knee; hospitalized at Reserve Field Hospital in Minsk.
1942: Transferred to Reserve Hospital XIII in Vienna. Left hospital, returned to service with cavalry section. Transferred to General Staff of Army Group E.
1944: Transferred due to illness of thyroid; hospitalized at Army Rest (Spa) Hospital at Semmering. Left hospital, conditionally fit for field service and returned to unit.
Though ‘General Staff of Army Group E’ should have spelled Löhr to Wiesenthal, he presumed that Waldheim had been a rather sickly low-level desk officer between hospitalizations and he was not enough of a Waldheim buff to recognize that his service in the Balkans varied from his official biographies. He told the Israelis there was no evidence against Waldheim.
Now, eight years later, Wiesenthal studied profil and the New York Times, but failed to find incriminating evidence against Waldheim. ‘Deportations from Greece were organized by the SS under Alois Brunner – unfortunately also an Austrian,’ he pointed out. While yet another Austrian, General Löhr, might have been a party to them, Wiesenthal saw no way Waldheim could have had any personal involvement. ‘Still,’ he added, ‘it is hard to imagine that, in his position, Waldheim knew nothing at all.’ And Simon challenged Waldheim’s assertion that he had no knowledge of the deportation of Jews from Greece.
The next day, Wiesenthal went to Germany to open a Holocaust exhibit in Cologne. There, Waldheim reached him by phone to thank him for his support. ‘But,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘he was very bitter and disappointed with me that I don’t believe him when he says he didn’t know about the deportations from Saloniki.
‘So I say to him: “All the time I have known you, I take you to be an intelligent man. This does not speak for your intelligence that 70,000 people can disappear before your eyes – there were transports of 2000 people every couple of days for weeks and months – and you know nothing.” So he says he was not in Saloniki most of the time and, when he was, he was five miles away. But I say to him: “How is it possible that you as an intelligence officer were unaware of these daily events when it is a known fact that the SS regularly transmitted reports on the deportations through the office of your superiors and when it is equally a known fact that these matters were regularly discussed among all officers? The transportation officers, the food officers, they all talked about it in the officers’ casino, but where were you?’”
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles made public Wiesenthal’s ‘rebuff’ of Waldheim and added ominously that it was ‘currently reviewing archival material dealing with German atrocities in Yugoslavia and Greece during World War II.’ But the anti-Waldheim initiative had already been seized on the East Coast – by the World Jewish Congress in New York, where executive director Elan Steinberg issued a steady barrage of press releases ‘exposing’ Waldheim:
‘WJC RELEASES DOCUMENTATION ON WALDHEIM’S NAZI PAST’
(5 March 1986)
‘UN UNDER WALDHEIM TURNED DOWN U.S. REQUEST FOR NAZI ARCHIVES’
(6 March)
‘COVER-UP CITED IN WALDHEIM CAMPAIGN LITERATURE’
(10 March)
‘WAL
DHEIM BOOK GIVES FALSE ACCOUNT OF WARTIME RECORD’
(17 March)
In the middle of March, the World Jewish Congress hired historian Herzstein to examine files on microfilm in the Captured German Records section of the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives in Washington with regard to Waldheim. Herzstein told Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel of the WJC, that he could give the project ten days, but no more. A forty-four-year-old New York native with an Oriental-looking moustache and beard, Herzstein had been sceptical about Waldheim ever since his university gave the Secretary General an honorary degree in 1979. Reading over the guest of honour’s official biography, Herzstein had wondered: ‘Who gets a law degree in Germany in 1944?’ But his 1986 mission, he told me, ‘was the same work I’ve been doing since 1969’ while producing such books as The Nazis; The War that Hitler Won, and Adolf Hitler and the German Trauma. ‘Researching Waldheim involved the same methodology, discipline, documents, and diplomacy’ in prompting archivists to suggest sources and answer questions one hadn’t thought to ask.
Toward the end of Herzstein’s first week in Washington, on Friday, 21 March 1986, senior archivist John Mendelsohn beckoned him over to a Recordak microfilm-reader and pointed to a blurry document on the screen. ‘Your friend,’ he said quietly, ‘was a war criminal.’
Startled, Herzstein blinked and asked: ‘What were the charges? And who made them?’
‘Murder,’ Mendelsohn told him tersely. ‘The Yugoslavs.’
They had discovered the 1947 Odluka (indictment) against Waldheim.
The next day in New York, the World Jewish Congress issued an announcement headed: ‘US ARMY AND UNITED NATIONS LISTED KURT WALDHEIM AS SUSPECTED NAZI WAR CRIMINAL WANTED FOR “MURDERER”’ in time to make the Sunday papers. Then, on Tuesday, at a crowded press conference in WJC headquarters at 1 Park Avenue in New York, Herzstein gave his findings and analyses of Waldheim’s links to the Kozara battle and massacre, ‘Operation Black’ and other anti-partisan actions, and prisoner interrogations. At the press conference, WJC Secretary General Israel Singer proclaimed, ‘Our first accusation is that Kurt Waldheim was a Nazi. We should rest our case and say that he was unfit to serve as Secretary General of the United Nations. We have proven that point beyond a shadow of a doubt.’ And then, as one Secretary General denouncing another, Singer went on to say: ‘We have proven as well that Kurt Waldheim is a liar. We have proven that beyond the shadow of a doubt, and he himself has contradicted himself as each new information about his past came to light in the last few weeks.’
Thus began a campaign of invective in which, to the Austrian public and much of the world, Israel Singer would come to personify the abrasive Jew bent on vengeance. In the coming months, Singer would call Kurt Waldheim ‘a sleazebag’ on national television and, in an interview suggesting he was blackmailable by Tito, compare him to a two-bit whore who takes a quarter here, a quarter there, and builds a clientele with two-bit favours that add up to a lot of time in bed. He gave an interview to profil in which he told Austrians that if they elected Waldheim as their President, every bearer of an Austrian passport would face remorseless scrutiny, contempt, and mistrust abroad. When the President of Vienna’s Jewish community pleaded with Singer to moderate his language before he made a bad situation worse for Austria’s Jews, Singer asked him: ‘How many Jews are living in Austria?’
‘Seven thousand.’
‘Then just let them emigrate,’ Singer replied.
A New York lawyer and one-time college professor of Viennese descent, Israel Singer had ample reason to resent and perhaps even hate Austria. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, even before the German troops arrived in the capital, hordes of Nazified Viennese burst into Jewish homes and shops, looting and smashing, and made the most dignified of men – among them, rabbis – drop to their hands and knees and, sometimes with mere toothbrushes, scrub pro-Schuschnigg slogans from the pavements. In a famous photo, Israel Singer’s father, president of Vienna’s religious Zionist community, was one of those humiliated Jewish men.
Israel Singer was born in New York City three or four years after his father fled Austria, but that photo has haunted his career. ‘And he has lived to avenge that moment,’ his proud mentor, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, told me in a Viennese wine tavern in mid-1987. Hertzberg, professor of religion at Dartmouth and vice-president of the WJC, called Singer ‘an acorn I planted that grew to be an oak.’
To Simon Wiesenthal, Singer was no oak, but a thorn in the healing process. ‘I’ll tell you who is reviving anti-Semitism in Austria!’ Wiesenthal exclaimed to journalists during the 1986 presidential campaign. ‘It is not the revelations about Waldheim’s past. It is an interview with Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, telling Austrians that Bitburg80 was one bitter day for President Reagan and that if Austrians elect Waldheim, the population of Austria is going to get six years of Bitburg. They have lit a fire. You cannot make a collective threat against an entire country and then pretend you can enforce it.’
In another conversation, Simon said he was appalled when ‘a young man called me to ask, “Did the Jews before 1938 act like Singer and his friends?’” And he added that Singer reminded him ‘a little of Rabbi [Meir] Kahane’, the Jewish Defence League militant who – on the podium of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset – would rip up a red-white-red Austrian flag and declare: ‘May the name of the cursed Nazi Waldheim be wiped off the face of the earth.’81
On billboards across Austria, ‘THE MAN THE WORLD TRUSTS’ had been joined by ‘WE AUSTRIANS WILL VOTE FOR WHOMEVER WE WANT!’ and a more ominous ‘JETZT ERST RECHT!’ (best translated as ‘NOW MORE THAN EVER’), a slogan Hitler had used on his posters, too. To make the threat clearer, the new posters used yellow – the colour of Hitler’s anti-Semitic proclamations and of the Star of David he made the Jews wear.
The entire Waldheim campaign was a glitzy Alpine exercise in American-style politicking. The Waldheim motorcade of at least five cars and twenty jump-suited young people would sweep into a town or city, set up rostrum and microphones, and distribute felt pens, bumper stickers, and photos of their candidate. An entertainer warmed up the waiting crowd with song and dance and topical one-liners. The local brass band played rousing oompah-oompah marches.
Enter the Waldheims on foot: she in dirndl, he in loden suit. They worked the crowd easily, shaking hands, embracing old acquaintances, cuddling babies, and handing out autographed photos of the candidate. Making their way to the flag-draped platform, they nodded and waved to a cheering public. Waldheim usually left it to the local mayor or the town’s most prominent People’s Party politician to proclaim that ‘we will not let foreigners dictate our politics’ and call for ‘an end to that slandering mafia in New York.’ Then Waldheim would open his arms wide in a big, empty embrace of welcome and, when the crowd quieted, call for ‘a return to Christian values, diligence, decency, and love of fatherland’ with brief references to ‘unjust attacks’ for ‘having only done my duty’ as a soldier. Only occasionally did he grow so specific as to say that ‘it is not these gentlemen from New York – Singer, Steinberg, and Rosenbaum – who will tell the Austrian people how to vote’, but whenever he harped on the Semitic sound of those three WJC officials’ names, the Waldheim Sonata played better than ever.
To tumultuous applause and resounding hymn-like music, the Waldheims would recede into a Mercedes waiting beside the platform while their mop-up team supervised clean-up and payments. The advance team was already on its way to the next speaking-stop. But Waldheim’s long day would not end with the last rally at 10 p.m., for that was when he would take to the transatlantic telephone for long discussions with his son Gerhard, who was doing damage-control duty in the US: debating Rabbi Hier on TV and the Op Ed pages; visiting Washington to plead his father’s case with Congressmen and the State and Justice Departments, and calling in old contacts, favours, and friendships from UN days to rally support.
Sometimes there were pickets carrying signs saying
‘WALDHEIM WAR CRIMINAL’ and ‘MEMORY GAP FOR PRESIDENT!’ Beate Klarsfeld came from Paris to try to disrupt Waldheim speeches in Linz and Vienna. Capitalizing on Chancellor Sinowatz’s quip that ‘Waldheim wasn’t a Nazi; only his horse was’, hecklers hoisted a four-foot-high papier mâché horse’s head with the motto: ‘A HORSE THE WORLD CAN TRUST’. When the Waldheim camp came up with a new slogan, ‘SLANDER MUST NOT PAY!’, demonstrators showed up carrying such placards, but with the first word crossed out and replaced by either ‘CRIME . . .’ or ‘ANTI-SEMITISM. . .’ At a rally in Vienna, hoodlums in loden and lederhosen beat up the protesters while the police looked on.
The national chairman of the People’s Party, Alois Mock accused the World Jewish Congress of ‘despicable infamy’ and ‘improper intervention in Austrian affairs’. When leaflets headed ‘AUSCHWITZ, TREBLINKA, MAJDANEK – NOW IT’S THE TURN OF VIENNA’ arrived in the mailboxes of prominent Jews, Mock denounced the hate-sheets as forgeries. The question, ‘forgeries of what?’ went unanswered. A Jewish art shop shut its door and adorned it with a sign, ‘CLOSED DUE TO THREATS’. Simon Wiesenthal said, ‘I know of several cases of taxi-drivers refusing to take Jewish passengers’, and Der Spiegel reported:
Not only are insults daily occurrences, but brutal attacks are increasing. Jews have been thrown out of cabs by cab drivers and spat upon in streets.
When three drunken youths tried to beat up Rabbi Jacob Biederman, he managed to flee, but shrugged off the attack as ‘nothing special’.
Armed with overkill, People’s Party general secretary Graff consistently took the low road and not only criticized Austria’s Jewish community for not distancing itself from the ‘dishonorable fellows’ of the WJC, but warned against ‘provoking feelings we all don’t want to have.’ When journalists asked Graff whether he wasn’t provoking the very emotions he professed to deplore, he snapped back: ‘You’re only putting us down because we have the courage to stand up to a few Jews!’
