Waldheim’s Mysterious Past

Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations who is now a candidate for president of Austria, continues to dismiss as unfounded smears all allegations about his possible association with World War II atrocities that were committed by the German army in the Balkans. But his denials and airy attempts to shrug off the charges--”And if it were true, well, so what?”--have been less than persuasive. At a minimum, the available evidence shows that Waldheim has avoided telling the truth about the duration and location of his wartime military service. And that raises hard questions about what he may be trying to hide.

Waldheim acknowledges that in 1938, shortly after Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich, he joined first a Nazi student group and then, a little later, a unit of the Nazi Sturmabteiling , the infamous Brown Shirts. He says that he did so to protect his anti-Nazi family and so that he would be allowed to continue his studies. Waldheim says that in 1942 he was badly wounded while serving on the Russian front and was given a medical discharge. In fact, German army records show, he was quickly returned to duty and assigned to the Balkans. There he served--as a translator, he says--on the staff of Gen. Alexander von Lohr, who in 1947 was hanged as a war criminal for atrocities against Serbs, Croats and Greeks. After the war, Yugoslavia put Waldheim’s name on a list of war-crimes suspects.

The preferred moment to have raised questions about Waldheim’s wartime activities would have been in 1971, when he sought his first term as head of the world organization that was born out of the fight against Nazism. That questions are being raised now, as Waldheim seeks to become Austria’s head of state, does not make them any less relevant. In his official biographies Waldheim ignores the years between 1942 and 1945. He had his reasons, and it is proper for the world to know now--albeit late--what those reasons really were.