Waldheim Tops Vote for Austrian President : Gets Plurality Amid Charges of Nazi Past; Runoff Still Required

Amid accusations that he hid a Nazi past and a questionable war record, former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim made an impressive showing in Austria’s presidential election Sunday, falling just short of the absolute majority required to avoid a runoff vote against his main opponent June 8.

According to complete, unofficial results, Waldheim won 49.6% of the vote, exceeding the projections of most pre-election polls and establishing himself as the clear favorite in the runoff.

With 89% of Austria’s 5.4 million eligible voters going to the polls, Waldheim polled 2,343,387 votes, a 282,125-vote edge over his nearest rival, Socialist candidate Kurt Steyrer, who captured 43.6%.

Clearly Pleased

Appearing with other candidates immediately after the results were announced, a clearly pleased Waldheim called his performance impressive.

“I’m filled with satisfaction to have come so close to 50%,” he said.

The result was the highest percentage ever attained by a non-Socialist presidential candidate in the post-World War II Austrian republic. Although not a member of any political party, Waldheim has been backed by the conservative Austrian People’s Party.

Some observers contended that except for the Soviet nuclear disaster, which they argued gave environmentalist candidate Freda Blau-Meissner an unexpectedly large 5.5% of the vote, Waldheim might have crossed the 50% mark. The remaining votes went to Otto Scrinzi, a rightist who favors union of Austria and Germany.

Waldheim said charges that he had belonged to two Nazi student organizations as a youth and had been involved in atrocities while serving with the German army in the Balkans in World War II had boomeranged on his Socialist opponent by creating a sympathy vote. Waldheim has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, but he has conceded he was less than forthright in dealing with his war service as a first lieutenant.

‘All Will Calm Down’

“This will certainly all calm down in the next five weeks,” he predicted, speaking of the second-round election campaign period.

Both Steyrer, a former health minister who had served as a medic in the German army, and Socialist Chancellor Fred Sinowatz agreed that Sunday’s results showed that the accusations had worked in Waldheim’s favor, a view shared by Vienna-based Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

“Without those accusations Dr. Waldheim surely would not have received as many votes,” Wiesenthal said.

But Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, took a different view on the impact of the charges against Waldheim.

“I think Mr. Waldheim would have to interpret today’s results as showing that the Austrian people are not confident of having a leader who is not trusted throughout the world,” Hier was quoted as saying in a dispatch by the Reuters news agency. “I am delighted that Kurt Waldheim did not achieve a victory, but it is unfortunate that so many Austrians voted for him despite the revelations about his hidden past.”

No Affair of Jewish Congress

The revelations of Waldheim’s alleged Nazi links and his purported involvement in war crimes came mainly from the New York-based World Jewish Congress. Its executive director, Elan Steinberg, said in New York that he is not surprised at the election outcome, but he insisted it was no affair of the congress.

“The only election that concerns us was (Waldheim’s) to the United Nations,” Steinberg said. “That was an historical obscenity.”

Waldheim served two terms as the U.N. chief from 1972 to 1982.

In Israel, some legislators called on the government to withdraw its ambassador to Austria if Waldheim is elected president.

Acting Foreign Minister Moshe Arens said Waldheim’s plurality stunned him.

Speaking on Israeli television, Arens said: “It has been 40 years since the Holocaust and we had believed that the German and Austrian nations were making a very serious effort to rehabilitate themselves. (The election results) are shocking, not just for every Jew but for every civilized person.”

The U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation to determine whether Waldheim’s war record contains enough blemishes to bar his entry into the United States.

The extent of accusations against Waldheim made the campaign for the largely ceremonial job of president the most bitter and controversial ever conducted in postwar Austria.

As the campaign progressed, the major issue here became not whether Waldheim was guilty or innocent of war crimes, but what his election would mean for Austria’s image.

Unlike West Germany, Austria has never been linked by outsiders with complicity in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich, even though it was an integral part of Nazi Germany for all but the final days of World War II.

The campaign was especially painful for Austria because, much as Waldheim has done, Austria itself had glossed over this unpleasant part of its history.

In the final days of the campaign, Sinowatz and his foreign minister, Leopold Gratz, urged Austrians to vote against Waldheim because, they said, his election would damage Austria’s global image.

Smear Campaign

But many Austrians saw the remarks of Sinowatz and other Socialists as election rhetoric and viewed Waldheim as the victim of a smear campaign.

At countless election rallies during the campaign, Waldheim repeated the message that as a soldier, he had only served his country, as hundreds of thousands of other Austrians had done.

It was a message that apparently found an audience.

There had been questions about Waldheim’s past, but they were not taken seriously, in the belief that anything scandalous would have surfaced either during his two-year tenure as Austria’s foreign minister or during his 10 years as U.N. secretary general.

Consequently, allegations printed simultaneously last March 3 in the New York Times and the Austrian news weekly Profil, contending that Waldheim had concealed a Nazi past and had served with units linked to wartime atrocities, stunned the country and the world.

Accusations Against Waldheim

He was specifically accused of belonging to two Nazi student organizations and, as a soldier, of serving with a unit involved in the 1942 deportation of more than 40,000 Greek Jews from the town of Salonika and of participating in a ruthless campaign against Yugoslav partisans in 1944.

Subsequent investigations, led principally by the World Jewish Congress, disclosed that the Yugoslav government had filed murder charges against Waldheim in 1947 and that the War Crimes Commission had placed him in the highest priority category for prosecution.

Waldheim has steadfastly rebutted the charges against him, telling Austrian voters and foreign journalists that the reports are part of a defamation campaign mounted by his political opponents.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall, based in London, was in Vienna for the election.