The Nazi Hunters (41 page)

Tagliabue had interviewed Waldheim a day earlier to confront him with the information unearthed to date and the
Times
ran his article on March 3. The story immediately turned into an international sensation. “Files Show Kurt Waldheim Served Under War Criminal,” the headline proclaimed.
Tagliabue explained that Waldheim had been attached to General Löhr’s command that brutally suppressed partisan units in Yugoslavia and deported Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz and other camps. It also pointed out that he was assigned to the army command in Salonika in March 1942, and had served as an interpreter for German and Italian officers in Yugoslavia.

Covering the story for
Newsweek,
I soon caught up with Waldheim
in the mountain resort town of Semmering, where he was spending the night after a long day of campaigning. He was hardly eager to field more questions about the revelations in
Profil
and the
Times,
but he agreed to an interview at his hotel, clearly figuring that he could engage in damage control. He was in a testy mood, yet he still managed to keep his emotions sufficiently in check to convey the impression that somehow the sudden uproar was all the result of a “misunderstanding” that he could easily clear up.

When it came to discussing the SA and the Nazi student organization, Waldheim used precisely that word. He had never joined the SA or any Nazi organization, he insisted. As a student at the Consular Academy in Vienna, he participated “in a few sporting exercises” of a student riding group, he said. Only later and unbeknownst to him, he insisted, the lists of participants of such groups were incorporated into the SA. Similarly, he had attended “a few meetings and nothing more” of a student discussion group. “I was not a member of either of the organizations. There seems to be a misunderstanding.”

Unlike the SS, the SA was never declared a criminal organization by the victorious Allies, and its members did not carry a similar stigma. Besides, once young men like Waldheim joined the army, they could not maintain their SA membership. Thus, the issue was more one of Waldheim’s credibility: had he been lying about his past all those years when he was rising to the top of the world’s largest international organization? Had he deliberately covered up his service in the Balkans under Löhr? If so, what else might he be hiding?

In contrast to his protestations that he was not a member of the SA or the Nazi student group, he did not deny that he had been assigned to the Balkans. “My service in the German Army is no secret whatsoever,” he said. But up till then he had only been open about the first part of his military career. The documents left no doubt that he had returned to active service after he recovered from the leg wound he suffered in Russia, and that he had been dispatched to the army command in Salonika, while at the same time he intermittently worked on his law degree.

I asked why he always had omitted that part of his history, including
in his recently published autobiography. “I did not enter into all these details, which in my opinion were not very important,” he replied. It was hardly a convincing explanation, but he seemed to believe he could slide by with that.

He became far more animated when I pressed him about his claim during his
Times
interview that he had known nothing about the deportation of Jews from Salonika. In 1943 while he was based there, thousands of Jews were loaded onto the trains that kept departing for the death camps. Yet he insisted his Balkan duties were largely that of a translator, which explained his photo with the Italian and German generals. In Salonika, he said, he was also focused on analyzing reports from the field about enemy troop movements. “Of course I deeply regret this,” he said, referring to the deportations. “This is part of that terrible Holocaust experience, but I can only tell you I had no knowledge whatsoever . . . for the first time [now] I heard that there were such deportations.”

As we talked, he grew more and more insistent. “Whether you believe it or not, that is the truth and I really just want to finish with this thing because there’s not a word of truth that I knew about this. Nothing. I was never involved in such things. I had no knowledge of this. This is a well-organized campaign against me.”

But “this thing” was hardly about to disappear; it was only just beginning.

• • •

Simon Wiesenthal was caught by surprise when the Waldheim story broke. As he noted bitterly in his memoir, he found out only then that Rosenbaum had been to Vienna “
without visiting me or even telephoning me.” Wiesenthal had dealt with WJC officials before, and, as Rosenbaum had predicted, he felt particularly offended that they would launch such an investigation and subsequent publicity campaign on his home turf without consulting him.

Besides, this was not the first time that there had been rumors about Waldheim’s wartime record. In 1979, the Israelis had asked Wiesenthal to check whether he had a Nazi past that might explain his pro-Arab stance at the U.N. Wiesenthal reported that he contacted Axel Springer,
the famed West German publisher, who agreed to examine the records at the Berlin Documentation Center for him since he had easy access to them. That inquiry produced no indication that Waldheim had belonged to any Nazi organizations. It did show that he had served in the Balkans, but at the time Waldheim’s efforts to omit all mentions of that service were less evident and not seen as especially significant.

When the Waldheim affair erupted in 1986, Wiesenthal was not troubled by the revelation that Waldheim was in a Nazi student organization. Wiesenthal quoted his close friend Peter Michael Lingens, a prominent Austrian journalist, who had pointed out that such membership was sometimes necessary “
even to obtain a room in a students’ hostel.” He wasn’t terribly upset by the news that Waldheim’s riding group was part of the SA, either. But despite his anger at the WJC, he was quick to denounce Waldheim not for what he had done—after all, no evidence had been produced that he was directly involved in war crimes—but for what he claimed he did not know. Wiesenthal viewed his claims that he knew nothing about the deportation of Jews from Salonika as simply unbelievable. “He is reacting as if he is in a panic,” he told me. “
I don’t understand why he is lying.”

Waldheim called Wiesenthal after he made that accusation. The candidate reiterated that he had been unaware of what was happening to the Jews in Salonika while he was there. “It is impossible that you didn’t notice anything,” Wiesenthal replied. “The deportations went on for six weeks. Some two thousand Jews were deported every other day; the military trains which brought down equipment for the Wehrmacht, that is for your people, took away the Jews on their return run.”

Waldheim continued to insist he knew nothing. Wiesenthal pointed out that the Jews made up almost a third of the population of Salonika, and surely he must have noticed something—Jewish shops locked up, Jews escorted through the streets and other telltale signs. When he met with the same response, he told Waldheim: “I cannot believe you.”

Wiesenthal was equally skeptical about Waldheim’s claims that he did not know about the atrocities committed by German troops in Yugoslavia, even though they were part of his army group. His position as an
intelligence officer, not just an interpreter as he initially tried to emphasize, meant that he was “one of the best-informed officers,” Wiesenthal concluded.

None of this meant, however, that Wiesenthal was ready to applaud the World Jewish Congress for its offensive against Waldheim—quite the contrary. Despite its name, that organization was “
no more than a small Jewish organization of inferior importance,” he declared. While he was convinced that Waldheim was both a liar and an opportunist, “he had been neither a Nazi nor a war criminal,” he maintained. But the WJC, Wiesenthal added, had immediately “proclaimed Waldheim a hard-line Nazi and well-nigh convicted war criminal.”

Waldheim’s defenders made the same charge and roundly denounced what they saw as a Jewish plot to stop their candidate.
Rosenbaum correctly noted that the
Times
’s story, which reflected the WJC findings, did not accuse Waldheim of war crimes, and that the issue at first was one of Waldheim’s lies. Still, as he admitted in his own account of the affair later, he and other WJC officials were stunned by the ferocity of the backlash, including in much of the Austrian press, and unable to parry questions effectively about what their goals were. Asked if they were trying to influence the election, they claimed they had only been interested in how Waldheim was elected twice as U.N. secretary-general in the 1970s given all the questions about his past. “But it was so obviously disingenuous that it convinced no one,” Rosenbaum conceded. “We very much wanted Waldheim to quit—or to be forced from—the race.”

Both the WJC and a growing army of reporters set out to see if there was more damning information that had not come to light yet. The WJC called in historian Robert Edwin Herzstein of the University of South Carolina to dig through the records. The ensuing stories raised new questions about what role Waldheim had played in the Wehrmacht’s Balkan campaign, how he had ended up on the Allies’ list of suspected war criminals in 1948, and why no government had sought his extradition—especially Yugoslavia, which had not pursued its own war crimes charges against him. Waldheim was far from a mere interpreter: his duties as an intelligence officer included handling reports about the capture of British
commandos who subsequently disappeared, and prisoner interrogations. As he had earlier conceded, they also included reporting on partisan activity in Yugoslavia.

Mounting a public relations counteroffensive, Waldheim sent his son Gerhard to Washington to present the Justice Department with a thirteen-page memo defending his military record and denying any role in war crimes. This included a rebuttal to accusations that he may have had a role in the massacres that took place in three villages in Yugoslavia in October 1944. This was a time when German troops were retreating nearly everywhere, and Löhr was pulling his troops out of the southern Balkans, pushing north through Macedonia. To do so, they needed to control a key stretch of road between the towns of Stip and Kocani. On October 12, as the documents unearthed by the WJC indicated, Waldheim signed a report about “strengthened bandit [partisan] activity along the Stip-Kocani road.”

There was no doubt that German troops had quickly unleashed their fury against the three villages on that road, but the critical question was how quickly and whether the bloodletting was triggered by Waldheim’s report. In the memo his son carried to Washington, Waldheim maintained that the German troops arrived in the villages on about October 20, which meant more than a week after his report about partisan activity there. If that was accurate, it would be much harder to link his report to what had happened next.

Along with a Yugoslav journalist, I traveled to Macedonia to see if I could discover anything in the three villages at the center of the dispute. What I learned there stood in stark contrast to Waldheim’s bland assertions on the campaign trail that implied that German troops in the Balkans were engaged in ordinary warfare, however violent, not in war crimes. “There were victims on both sides,” he said. The survivors offered a very different view, and they all recalled that the massacres took place on October 14, not October 20 as Waldheim had maintained.

Petar Kocev described how he was coming home to his village of Krupiste after working in the fields that day. German officers rounded up all the men of the village and arranged them in rows of ten. Kocev was in
the first row—but he was the eleventh man, so the officers pushed him out of the row at the last moment. “All ten were shot immediately,” he recalled. The Germans then opened fire on everyone else. Kozev ran to a river a mile away and hid out in the hills for a month. “When I returned, I found only the walls of our house. Everything had been burned.”

Risto Ognjanov pointed to a small monument commemorating the village’s forty-nine victims. When the Germans showed up, he said, they ordered him and several other villagers to crouch on all fours on that spot. “I just dropped when the shots started,” he recalled. “Two dead bodies fell on top of me. After the shooting, the Germans began to check who was alive by shooting bullets into the feet.” The bodies covering Ognjanov protected him. When the Germans left, he and two other survivors crawled out from under the bloody pile. “For me, October 14 is my second birthday,” he said, breaking into tears. “It was the beginning of my second life.” There were similar stories in the other villages.

None of this proved that Waldheim was directly responsible for the massacres. But it established that his report on “bandit activity” in the area was filed only two days before they took place, making it much more likely that it was part of the chain of events leading to them.

At that point, I had never talked to Rosenbaum, since a colleague in New York was handling the interviews with him and other WJC officials. But after my article ran in the magazine, Rosenbaum called me to check that all the survivors I had talked to were certain of the date of the massacres. They were absolutely certain, I told him.

• • •

The impact of the cascade of stories was that, in the eyes of much of the world, Waldheim was increasingly suspect, but in the eyes of many of his countrymen he was the victim of a slander campaign. The latter, of course, was the message that Waldheim and his backers kept peddling at campaign rallies. After he fell just short of winning an outright 50 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections in May, necessitating a run-off in early June, they redoubled their efforts to play up attacks from people like WJC’s Singer and Israel’s Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
At a rally I attended, Waldheim focused on the “circles
from abroad” who he charged were running a smear campaign. “Neither a Herr Singer in New York nor a Herr Shamir in Israel . . . has the right to meddle in the affairs of another state,” he declared.

It was language that hardly needed to be decoded: its message was that the Jews needed to be taught a lesson. “Ladies and gentlemen, enough of the past!” he added. “We have more important problems to solve.”