Nazi Hunter (69 page)

‘I must be the conscience of the world,’ Kurt Waldheim proclaimed shortly after he was elected head of the UN in late 1971.
Conscience
was, in retrospect,
an appropriate choice of word by Waldheim. At its old French and Latin literal roots, the word means ‘with knowing’. In Waldheim’s native German, however, the word
Mitwisser
(literally, ‘with-knower’) means ‘accessory’.

His entry in the 1972 edition of
Who’s Who in Austria
had at least one major omission:

This impressive record was followed by sixteen lines of awards. There was no mention of military service in World War II. I had heard that Waldheim had served in the German
Army, but was not a Nazi. Since a friend of mine in New York had written that ‘it’s bizarre to listen to the UN these days and hear it presided over by a man who speaks English with the
same accent as Paul Henreid’, I made a note to fill in the wartime gap when I interviewed Waldheim in the summer of 1972 at his country home on the Attersee, a mountain lake in the
Salzkammergut region of Austria.

Not that the omission was alarming.
Who’s Who in Austria
had also neglected to mention Waldheim’s 1971 campaign for the Presidency of Austria as candidate of the
People’s Party (so the postwar Blacks call themselves) against the beloved Socialist incumbent, Franz Jonas. Although I had just arrived in Austria, one could sense that Waldheim was destined
to lose. ‘He’s a good man – too good to be President of Austria’, I kept hearing, sometimes followed by ‘He’s too stiff’ or ‘He spends too much time
outside of Austria.’ When Waldheim did lose, the only surprise was that the margin was close, with Waldheim winning 47.2 per cent of the vote.

Losing that election was one of the best things that ever happened to Waldheim, for it made him available that autumn when the UN chose a successor to U Thant, who was bowing out of the
$62,500-a-year post with a bleeding ulcer. As a compromise candidate whose most publicized qualification was his inoffensiveness to the five permanent members of the Security Council –
Britain, France, the US, the Soviet Union, and newly arrived Red China –
Waldheim was expected to be as passive as his Buddhist predecessor. But nobody who knew him
expected him to tiptoe in U Thant’s footsteps.

To
Newsweek
cartoonist Ranan Lurie, Waldheim admitted at a sitting: ‘Yes, I know I am colourless. But I must emphasize: I am not passive. If people were to look into my private
life and my background, they would find out that I
have
to be active . . . However, I know from experience that you cannot force issues. I must be careful – but please let us not
interpret caution as cowardice.’ While questioning him, Lurie noted: ‘He takes time to think out his reply. He is a sincere and open man; he does not try to evade questions.’

In Austria in 1986, as the Presidential election neared, two jokes surfaced in the anti-Waldheim campaign: a definition of ‘Waldheimer’s Disease: you grow so senile
you forget you were a Nazi’ and ‘the man is so thick-skinned that he doesn’t need a backbone to stand erect.’ Neither was accurate, but it took four decades to fill in the
gaps in Waldheim’s biography – and autobiographies.

For Kurt Waldheim, the war really began where he often implied it ended: in the 1941 campaign against Russia after Hitler betrayed Stalin and the ‘non-aggression’ pact their two
dictatorships had signed in August 1939, just days before they had invaded, divided, and gobbled up Poland. At 3 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Lieutenant Waldheim and his cavalry unit and their horses
plunged into the River Bug – which had served as the dividing line between the German and Soviet zones of occupied Poland – and made their way across the water into the city of
Brest-Litovsk. After four days of ‘sanitizing’ the Byelorussian city by wiping out snipers in its streets, sharpshooters in its citadel, and a Red Army squadron holed up in its railway
station’s cellar, Waldheim’s mounted reconnaissance unit AA45 moved eastward.

By October, when the first snows fell and AA45 had been depleted by many casualties, Waldheim had received two medals and was put in charge of his division’s First Mounted Squadron: 244
horses and 242 soldiers. In November, the temperature fell below zero – and stayed there. As Napoleon found out in 1812 and Hitler was about to learn, the Russian winter works to no
invader’s advantage.
At the beginning of December, when his division reached the area south-west of Orel, it was surrounded by the Red Army.

On Wednesday, 10 December 1941 – three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a day before Germany and Italy would declare war on the United States – a Russian grenade
exploded near Waldheim and a splinter of it wounded him in the right leg. He was evacuated by sled, with an orderly trying to wash his wound in the snow and urging him to move his leg, despite the
pain, to avoid losing it to frostbite. It was eight days before he and ninety other casualties reached a field hospital after German troops had punched a hole in the Russian encirclement. By then,
the wound was infected. Though semi-conscious, Waldheim woke up when the first doctor to examine him said: ‘I think I’m going to have to amputate the leg. If only I had real wool to
wrap it in, then the surgeon might be able to save it.’

‘I have real wool,’ said Waldheim, reaching into his knapsack and producing a cherished scarf which a Dutch classmate at the Consular Academy, Susanne Kempers, had once improvised
for him.

When he was anaesthetized for surgery, there was still some question whether he would come out of it with both legs. But he awoke to the lilting accent of a Viennese surgeon saying: ‘My
boy, one more day and your leg would have been gone.’

The Russians were advancing on the field hospital when Lieutenant Waldheim, successfully operated on, was to be evacuated on the last hospital train out. In a 1988 interview with me, he recalled
his departure vividly: ‘I was lying on the ground on straw, but just when the medical orderlies came to pick me up and carry me to the train, the doctor said: “Look, the man behind you
has lost his leg. Your wound is not so bad. Would you agree to our taking him instead of you?” The man was shouting with heavy pain, so I couldn’t say no. Then I lay back and waited to
be captured. But, hours later, at four o’clock in the morning, suddenly somebody came in and said: “There’s another train. It’s not a hospital train, but a cattle train and
we’ll try getting the wounded people out on it if that’s all right with you.”’ Relieved to travel westward cattle-class rather than eastward as a POW of the Russians,
Waldheim was ‘lifted on to a stretcher and so I was also rescued, but I couldn’t know that beforehand. So you see, this was something that impressed me, shocked me, and concerned
me directly: would I survive or not? And this I can remember as fresh as if it happened yesterday.’

This crucial episode does not appear in any of his memoirs. In 1985’s
In the Eye of the Storm
, Waldheim wrote:

And, in an earlier book,
The Challenge of Peace
(1977):

‘It was impossible to leave Austria,’ Kurt Waldheim wrote disarmingly and deceptively in
In the Eye of the Storm
:

In response to a 1980 inquiry by Representative Stephen J. Solarz, a Democratic Congressman from New York, Waldheim replied blithely: ‘I myself was wounded on the eastern
front and, being incapacitated for further service at the front, resumed my law studies at Vienna University, where I graduated in 1944.’

What Waldheim failed to mention both times (and on numerous other occasions) was that, between the beginning of 1942 and 14 April 1944, the date he received his Doctor of Laws degree, he
spent no more than eight of those twenty-seven and a half months as a student. Where was he and what was he doing during the rest of that time?

In mid-March 1942, Lieutenant Waldheim completed his convalescence and returned to active duty – in Yugoslavia, which had been overrun eleven months earlier by Germany and three neighbours
aligned with the Axis
⁷⁵
through choice or necessity: Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Classified as unfit for combat but qualified for staff duty,
Lieutenant Waldheim was dispatched to the south central Yugoslavian town of Pljevlja, where his new unit, the Bader Combat Group, was working with the Italian Army’s rugged alpine division,
the Pusteria Mountain Infantry, to wipe out guerrilla resistance and its civilian support in the Dubrovnik-Sarajevo area. Since Italian was the strongest of Waldheim’s three foreign languages
(French and English were the others), he was put to work as an interpreter, with no command authority, in a radio truck manned by a Signal Corps team of technicians. Of his two months there, he
contends: ‘I committed no crime in the whole time. I sat there and the German command gave orders to the Italian units and the Italians gave messages back, so they needed someone to translate
. . .’

Named after Paul Bader, the commanding general of German forces in Croatia, the Bader Combat Group was notorious for its harsh treatment of civilians as well as partisans. It had the authority
to destroy villages and deport whole communities to concentration camps when sabotage occurred, or to take all males hostage and execute up to ‘one hundred Serbs for each German killed, fifty
Serbs for one German wounded.’ Always, ‘the most terrifying means of punishment’ were the official guideline. A Bader Group quartermaster’s report dated 20 May 1942 shows
that, under German supervision, the Italian Pusteria Division turned 488 Yugoslav civilians over to the SS in Sarajevo for deportation to Norway as slave labour.

There is no evidence, however, that Lieutenant Waldheim and his communications team were ever present at deportations or
‘pacification operations’. In fact,
what little is known portrays a relatively peaceful and sometimes conversationally daring twenty-three-year-old making the best of a faintly threatening assignment in the hinterlands. From Italian
witnesses, we learn that he was well liked in Pljevjla, particularly by one of the daughters of the Rabrenovic family, in whose home he was billeted; from Yugoslav witnesses, that he was generous
in sharing chocolates with the natives; and, from various eye-witnesses, that he was seen playing cards and chatting by candlelight with General Giovanni Esposito, chief of the Pusteria Division,
over tea in a local pastry shop. Most remarkably, in a 1987 military history of Italy’s campaigns in the area between 1941 and 1943, Giacomo Scoti writes:

De Poh’s diary tells how Waldheim’s mobile unit pulled into an Italian base at Cajnice for a couple of days. As soon as the team of four Germans disembarked,
Lieutenant Waldheim was invited to the officers’ mess, but insisted on eating with his men in the canteen: an example from which, De Poli hints, his superiors could have benefited. Be that as
it may, hob-nobbing with his higher-ups and translating and transmitting radio traffic, Lieutenant Waldheim could scarcely have been unaware, as he steadfastly maintains, of what the Bader Combat
Group and Pusteria Infantry Division were doing to civilians in Yugoslavia.

This was confirmed in 1988 by Zola Genazzini, an Italian former lieutenant in the division’s Alpine Artillery, who remembers Waldheim in Pljevlja not only as ‘the first German
officer I ever saw’, but also as a friend who, soon after joining the Italians, asked him at an Easter banquet whether it was true that some of the other guests had been killing civilians. In
particular, Waldheim asked Genazzini whether a Major Ricci had killed captured, disarmed
partisans in cold blood after a battle. When the answer was yes, Waldheim remarked
that this meant General Esposito ‘had not taken the necessary disciplinary provisions, measures, against these officers.’ According to Genazzini, Waldheim added that he would talk to
General Esposito about it.