Nazi Hunter (73 page)

Both April communications are reprinted in full in ‘The White Book’ (though not translated from German in its English version) and cited as clarification that, at Arsakli,
deportations were dealt with exclusively by Major Hammer, the
counter
-intelligence officer, and not by Waldheim as a
military
intelligence officer.

Back on 7 April 1944, while Waldheim was still in Austria on his extended medical leave, a British ‘Special Boat Squadron’ of seven commandos and three Greek partisans – who
had set out in a fishing boat flying a Turkish flag to raid the German-held Aegean islands of Khalki and Alimnia – were captured in a gun battle with a German patrol boat. They and their
vessel were taken to the Greek island of Rhodes. The fishing boat’s high-powered radio was a prize catch for German intelligence, which was able to monitor British marine and naval
communications in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean areas for several days before the British realized it was in enemy hands. The prisoners were sent on to Salonika for a fortnight of
questioning – but not by Waldheim.

The interrogators sent what they had learned up the hill to Arsakli, where their report arrived on 24 April and was acknowledged with Waldheim’s initial on the ‘received’
stamp. This is as far as Waldheim’s involvement can be documented. Two days later, the intelligence section in Arsakli cabled the Commander-in-Chief South East in Belgrade that further
interrogations would be ‘fruitless’ and to ‘request decision whether prisoners now to be delivered to the SD’, which meant torture, execution, or both. Six of the commandos
were executed that spring. The only survivor of their ill-fated mission was the captain of the raiding party, who had been sent directly from Rhodes to a POW camp in Germany well before the death
decrees were passed from Belgrade via Arsakli.

Late at night on 1 July, another British commando raid – this one on the island of Calino – met with similar results. The Germans took three prisoners: two wounded Britons and an
American medic. The two Englishmen were flown to Athens, where one of them, a
Private Fishwick, died in hospital. The other, a sergeant named John Dryden, disappeared after
being ‘handed over to the SD in compliance with the Führer Order’ of 18 October 1942 that captured Allied commandos were not to be allowed to surrender, but must be
‘eliminated to the last man’ – either right away or after interrogation. This post-mortem on John Dryden, dated 18 July 1944, bears Waldheim’s initial.

The third captive – James Doughty, twenty-six, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, serving with the Royal Medical Corps – was taken to Salonika and interrogated, but was not turned over to
the SD. Respecting his status as an unarmed non-combatant, the Germans shipped him to a POW camp in Germany. Doughty lived to contradict Waldheim in 1986, when the Austrian presidential candidate
contended that ‘there were no POW or partisan interrogations carried out at the Army Group command in Arsakli.’ For Arsakli was precisely where Doughty was interrogated in July 1944,
his lawyer told the World Jewish Congress almost forty-two years later. And the intelligence unit’s monthly activity report for July 1944 – initialled by Waldheim – lists among
its achievements ‘interrogation of prisoners of the Anglo-American mission in Greece.’

This boast, like the various other initiallings, in no way implies involvement by Waldheim. Two British investigations of these and other commando cases have upheld him. In 1986, the Foreign
Secretary declared that there was no ‘evidence of any criminal activity on the part of Lieutenant Waldheim in relation to those men’ and, three years later, the Ministry of Defence
affirmed that ‘the then Lieutenant Waldheim was a mere junior staff officer. There is no evidence . . . of any causative, overt act or omission from which his guilt of a war crime may be
inferred.’

British and American captives were, however, few and far between. The daily briefings of General Löhr or a deputy were more immediate concerns of Lieutenant Waldheim’s. German
military documents which the World Jewish Congress found slumbering in the US National Archives in Washington show that Lieutenant Waldheim briefed Löhr’s second-in-command, General
Erich Schmidt-Richberg, on ‘the situation in the Mediterranean, Italy, and the Balkans’ on 20 May 1944, at a meeting that also discussed ‘effective’ use of hostages on a
train in the Peloponnesus, mainland Greece’s southern peninsula, ‘to ensure the security of
rail transport.’ To discourage the Greek resistance from firing
upon or sabotaging trains under German control, the Germans would round up Greek civilians and pack them into large cages that were attached to the fronts of trains. This exposed them to any
gunfire, bombings, or derailments by their own partisans.

On 25 May 1944, Waldheim wrote a memorandum that was unearthed in 1987 in a Munich archive by Professor Herzstein (this time, not working for the World Jewish Congress, but for his own 1988
book,
Waldheim: the Missing Years
). It criticized indiscriminate killings in no uncertain terms:

Though his stated objections were pragmatic rather than moral, this protest does Waldheim credit. But it also shows that the young lieutenant was indeed aware of what was going
on. Historian Herzstein says that, in examining thousands of documents of the German forces in Greece, ‘I have seen few stronger protests of this kind, and then only from the pens of far more
powerful men.’

On 13 June 1944, Waldheim briefed General Schmidt-Richberg on ‘the situation in the West, Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans’ at a meeting that also discussed civilian slave
labour.

On 9 August 1944, Waldheim briefed General Schmidt-Richberg on ‘the far west, Italy, France, and the situation in the Balkans.’ There was also a discussion of the daily success of
‘Operation Viper’, a series of ruthless ‘cleansing operations’ in which whole villages were wiped out to intimidate resistance; some researchers suspect that
‘Viper’ was also a round-up of the last remaining Jews in southern Greece. The next day, General Löhr issued an order that partisan activity ‘must be retaliated in every case
with shooting or hanging of hostages, destruction of the surrounding localities, etc.’

On the following day, Friday, 11 August, Lieutenant Waldheim’s evening intelligence report noted, ‘In Athens: several communists
shot during raids’, and
identified an area south of the port of Herakleion on the island of Crete as a centre of ‘bandit activity’, meaning partisan operations. Two days later, German forces launched a
‘cleansing’ operation south-west of Herakleion and reported (to the intelligence command in Arsakli) that they had ‘destroyed two bandit villages’ and ‘shot to death
twenty hostages.’

It could be said (and has been said) that Waldheim’s intelligence function was to point a finger and other hands would pull the trigger. Three years later, his 11 August 1944 evening
intelligence report would be read in open court by US prosecutors in Nuremberg as evidence in the war crimes trial of General Wilhelm List, the Belgrade-based commander-in-chief of the German Army
in the Balkans, and eleven other German officers charged with mass murder of hostages and ‘reprisal’ destruction of hundreds of towns and villages during Operation Viper. List received
a life sentence,
⁷⁷
but little or no attention was paid to the signature on just one of many incriminating documents; Kurt Waldheim, in 1947,
mattered to barely a handful of people, all in Austria.

Those people – most of all, his fiancée – were waiting eagerly for his return from Greece on 15 August 1944, on ‘compassionate leave’ to wed. On Saturday the 19th,
between Allied bombardments, Kurt Waldheim and Elisabeth Ritschel were married by Father Georg Plank beneath the green copper dome of Vienna’s baroque Karlskirche. When they set out for their
honeymoon in the pilgrimage shrine and mountain resort of Mariazell, some ninety miles from Vienna, their train had hardly cleared the city when air-raid sirens sounded. ‘All the passengers
were hustled off and we spent our wedding night in the crowded basement of die local railway station, listening to the bombs falling overhead,’ Waldheim writes in his memoirs, without hinting
he was still a soldier then.

By late summer of 1944, the Axis had lost the war, but millions of lives were yet to be lost before certainty would become reality. With external enemies massing on the rim of the Third
Reich’s Balkan boundaries, and internal enemies gathering strength, Hitler ordered General Löhr on 1 September to evacuate the Balkan Peninsula in order to mass German defences around
Hungary,
Austria, Czechoslovakia, and northern Italy as buffers against invasion from south or east.

In the first week of September, a cable from Arsakli aborted the Waldheims’ honeymoon in Mariazell. Lieutenant Waldheim was summoned back to duty for Army Group E’s gradual
withdrawal from Greece into Yugoslavia. While ending more than a fortnight ahead of schedule, all was not lost on this honeymoon that had begun with a bombardment and ended with a retreat. The
bride returned to Vienna pregnant.

‘From Sept. 6 [1944] until the end of the year (after then, there are no documents) we find, almost without interruption, Waldheim’s signature or the initial W on the intelligence
reports of Army Group E,’ writes Hanspeter Born, foreign editor of the Zurich weekly
Die Weltwoche
, in his 1987 study,
Certified Correct: Kurt Waldheim
. But it was not until
12 October, the day before Löhr and his staff transferred their headquarters from Arsakli to Kosovska Mitrovica in southern Yugoslavia, that Lieutenant Waldheim was implicated in events that
led both the postwar United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes to accuse him of murder.

On Thursday, 12 October 1944, the lead item in Lieutenant Waldheim’s morning and evening intelligence reports noted a build-up of partisan activity along the thirty-five-mile stretch of
winding road between the Yugoslavian towns of Stip and Kocani on the main route of Army Group E’s imminent withdrawal through Macedonia to its new base. The next day, Waldheim and Colonel
Warnstorff flew to Kosovska Mitrovica in General Löhr’s plane. On Saturday, 14 October, late in the afternoon, most of Army Group E commenced the 200-mile road journey through a ghostly,
ghastly moon landscape where corpses of partisans had been strung up as a warning message on every second telegraph pole. But no difficulties were encountered between Stip and Kocani.

The 1947 conclusion of the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes that ‘Kurt Waldheim, Austrian, lieutenant, military intelligence office, was a war criminal’ is based on how the
perils to Germans on the Stip-Kocani stretch were eradicated in response to the warnings in Waldheim’s reports. For, on Group E’s moving day, 14 October, German troops set fire to three
villages – Krupiste, Gorni Balvan, and Dolnyi Balvan – between Stip and Kocani and executed 114 of their inhabitants.

A hundred miles up the road, Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim – who had flown over the three villages the day before when they were still living, breathing places –
had already resumed what his ‘White Book’ calls ‘factual reporting of enemy military activity’ which ‘served as a basis for the orientation of the high command, but
not for tactical field decisions by local commanders.’ In 1986, Waldheim contended that the massacres hadn’t taken place until 20 October, putting an additional six days between cause
and effect. When corrected hours later, he had an alibi anyway: ‘At the date of these atrocities, I was not in the area.’ Nobody had said he was.

More damning than any of his defences was his own report on ‘enemy losses’ for the month of October 1944. Found by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the National Archives in
Washington in 1986, Waldheim’s calculation was 739 ‘bandits’ killed and ninety-four taken prisoner. According to the WJC, ‘the tell-tale data in Waldheim’s report is
his accompanying notation that these 833 purported resistance fighters had among them only sixty-three weapons (thirteen machine-guns, forty-nine rifles, and a submachine-gun). Thus, it would
appear that many, if not most, of those killed were unarmed civilians’ – presumably including the 114 people murdered in the 14 October reprisals in Krupiste, Gorni Balvan, and Dolnyi
Balvan.

In 1947, Yugoslavia brought to trial the commander of the 14 October 1944 killing operation between Stip and Kocani: Captain Karl-Heinz Egberts-Hilker from Reconnaissance Battalion 22 of the
German Army’s 22nd Infantry Division. The WJC contended that Egberts-Hilker, who was hanged in Belgrade in 1948 for arson and murder, testified that Waldheim was responsible for the reprisal
murders of which Egberts-Hilker was accused, and that the order for the operation had come from Waldheim.

The President of Austria’s apologists scoffed at the notion that a low-level lieutenant had such authority and pointed out that in his statement of defence Egberts-Hilker told his Yugoslav
judges: ‘I have acknowledged this action from the first day of my interrogation. I have emphasized that I accept the entire responsibility, and that none of my subordinates and soldiers bear
any guilt. Nor have I ever tried to shift the blame to my own superiors or use the earlier mentioned “general order” as an excuse.’ In this case, the defendant was referring to a
Hitler order that, when German Army units were
attacked by partisans, all villages from which the partisans originated should be burned and all male inhabitants between
sixteen and sixty killed.

‘I was amazed,’ Kurt Waldheim told me in 1989, ‘when I saw in that war-crime file that I was made responsible for Stip-Kocani. First of all, I couldn’t remember where it
was and what it was. But I had to look deeply into the matter and my son Gerhard helped me very nicely to find out that this captain who was executed was a very honest man who took all
responsibility himself. Before he died, he wrote a very moving letter to his mother that I have read. It is true that he destroyed these villages – but without any knowledge on my part or
anybody else’s. Anyway, there were several levels of command between him and headquarters of Army Group E. He said in his defence that his unit was attacked continuously from those villages.
He had the order to protect a bridge so that the German Army could use it. And since he was continuously attacked by partisans from those villages, he then gave the order to destroy them in line
with the general orders he had from Hitler. He said in his defence that he did not purposely kill women and children, but he had no choice. He made it crystal clear that he had no specific order to
do this, but felt he had to on the basis of the general order. But, because I mentioned these incidents does not make me responsible for them. The language that crossed my desk did not refer to
human tragedy, but to “counter-actions” and “self-defence”. If I had seen any of this, I might have been shocked to death, but the way it was expressed, it mentioned
“losses”, not women and children.’