Waldheim: Past and Present

Kurt Waldheim ran for president of Austria on the slogan “a man the world can trust.” More appropriately, he is a man the world would be right to regard with deep and enduring suspicion. The basis for doubts about Waldheim is that for 40 years he did not tell the truth about a vital part of his life. When finally confronted with the truth, the former secretary general of the United Nations responded with evasions, equivocations and ultimately attacks on those who brought to light the facts that he had for so long tried to bury.

The known facts are these: Waldheim was not discharged from the German army in 1942 with war wounds, as he always claimed. He served in that army for three more years, not as an unimportant interpreter--another discredited claim--but as an intelligence officer on the staff of a man later executed for war crimes. In that position Waldheim almost certainly knew about his unit’s participation in atrocities against civilians in Yugoslavia, and in the deportation to death camps of Jews from Greece.

Many Austrians were quick to echo Waldheim’s charge, with its implication of conspiracy and fabrication, that the World Jewish Congress and the media were out to smear him. In fact, the World Jewish Congress simply made public what had long lain neglected in the archives of the United Nations and the U.S. government. Austrians, sensitive about a past when so many of them had rushed to embrace Nazism, were inclined to excuse that record. And so just under 54% of them voted for Waldheim, not necessarily because he was once listed as a wanted war criminal but in spite of that.

A country that for 40 years has wanted to forget its past has chosen for its president a man who is a master at forgetting his own.