Kohl Meeting With Waldheim Annoys Israel

Israel voiced deep regret Sunday over German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, previously shunned by the West over allegations of hiding a Nazi past.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s spokesman Ehud Gol told reporters: “We deeply regret Chancellor Kohl’s action because of the sensitivity of the subject of meeting Waldheim, but principally in the face of the sinister winds now blowing through Europe.”

Gol declined to elaborate, but the head of the German Jewish community has cited resurgent anti-Semitism in Germany. During World War II, the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews.

In Munich on Friday, Kohl became the first Western leader to meet with Waldheim since the West began avoiding him over the accusations, which arose in 1986.

Waldheim, a former U.N. secretary general, denies reports that as a lieutenant in Hitler’s occupation army in the Balkans he was involved in sending villagers to death camps and in interrogating allied prisoners of war.

Bonn called Waldheim’s Munich stop an informal visit.

In Israel, Foreign Minister David Levy said on radio that “the Germans should show greater sensitivity to the concept of Jews than any other people, and certainly the German chancellor.

“They say there is a different Germany,” Levy said. “We would like to see an expression of that change.”