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In the photo – Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim (second from left), who in 1972-1981 was the Secretary General of the UN, and then was elected President of Austria. Next to him, the first on the right is General of the 7th SS Division Arthur Phleps. The picture was taken at the airfield in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, May 22, 1943. (Photo: Yad Vashem Photo Collections, World Jewish Congress)
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Thanks to a team of investigative lawyers led by Eli Rosenbaum It turned out that Kurt Waldheim, ex-UN Secretary General and former President of Austria, was an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II and was involved in Nazi crimes.
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The secret services of the Soviet Union clearly knew about the involvement of Kurt Waldheim in Nazi crimes. Therefore, the representative of the USSR vetoed other candidates for the post of Secretary General of the United Nations in 1971. Consequently, the seat was taken by the Austrian diplomat Waldheim, and the USSR used information about him to obtain concessions from the UN, which increased KGB espionage in the United States. And the CIA’s failure to foresee was a major setback for the intelligence agency.
Eli Rosenbaum and William Goffer wrote about it 30 years ago in the book Treason: The Inside Story of Kurt Waldheim’s Investigation and Cover-Up. The first of the authors was a trial attorney in the Office of Special Investigations in the early 1980s. (OSI). This division of the US Department of Justice was primarily engaged in the search for Nazi criminals and the deprivation of their American citizenship.
Few people would have known about Waldheim’s Nazi past if, after the leadership of the UN, he had not gathered for the presidency of Austria. At home, the politician was in great demand and skillfully took advantage of this. In March 1985, the Austrian Social Democrats invited him to run for election from their party. However, Waldheim went to the People’s Party, which, according to sociology, had a lot of voter support.
«An Austrian who is trusted by the whole world.” The whole country was already full of this slogan with the face of the former UN Secretary General, when the main Social Democrat Fred Zinovac promised his fellow party members to publish details before the elections «brown” past of Waldheim. He said this in a limited circle of colleagues. However, on the same days, the editor-in-chief of Profil magazine, Helmut Foska, received front-line photographs from the Second World War from unknown people – they show the leader of the presidential race in the form of a Nazi officer.
Waldheim noted in his biography that after the Anschluss of Austria by the Third Reich in 1938, he was soon taken into the army. Three years later he was wounded on the eastern front, and after the hospital he was engaged only in paper and translation work for the army.
At first, journalists perceived compromising information on the candidate as an ordinary brawl of political competitors. However, on the eve of the elections, a memorial plaque in honor of Alexander Lehr appeared in the barracks of the Vienna Military Academy. This Austrian general led the Wehrmacht Army Group E in the Balkans, was recognized by the Yugoslav tribunal as a war criminal and executed back in 1947. And Waldheim, as it turned out, served on Lehr’s headquarters when he gave his bloodiest orders.
This was reported by the same Profil and, in particular, refreshed the memory of its readers about how General Lehr led the deportation of the Jewish population of Greece to the death camps. The publication also recalled the orders of the Nazi to take women and children hostage, the executions of civilians for possible support of the Yugoslav partisans.
At his trial on May 24, 1945, Lehr stated: “Yes, I heard that the Jews were locked up in the ghetto, and I also heard that some of them died. Later, I also heard a report that the police used cars with gas chambers to exterminate civilians, allegedly in Poland. I did not check if these reports were true, because I was not responsible for them and did not have the opportunity to do so.
The glory of the punisher of the partisan regions in the Balkans also reached out to General Phleps, in the company with whom Waldheim was photographed.
The scandal was just beginning, and the representative of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) left the US for Vienna for a preliminary investigation. Already in early February, documents about the Nazi past of the former UN Secretary General fell into the hands of Eli Rosenbaum, General Counsel of the WJC.
And six weeks later, on the basis of WJC research, the UN War Crimes Commission concluded: Waldheim was involved in Nazi massacres and should be arrested.
The presidential candidate had to admit what he would rather never remember: “Yes, I knew [о массовых расстрелах]. I was scared. What could I do? I had to continue serving in order not to be executed. I have never shot or even seen a partisan.” Although the WJC established that Waldheim received a medal from the fascist leadership of Yugoslavia for his successful fight against the underground.
The world press called this forgetfulness «Waldheim’s disease. However, in Austria itself, his reputation only increased. Former Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, a Jew, called the WJC investigation «Невиданdisgrace.” “The Austrians will not allow Jews from abroad to tell us who should be our president,” said the politician, who led the federal government for 13 consecutive years.
Even Simon Wiesenthal, the most famous Nazi hunter at the time, stood up for Waldheim. And on the eve of the elections, Austria was dotted with banners with the slogan Vote for whoever we want!
Waldheim won the presidential race in June 1986. Immediately after the inauguration, Israel withdrew its ambassador from Austria, and in the next six years, diplomatic relations between Tel Aviv and Vienna were effectively severed.
Almost none of the leaders of the countries congratulated Waldheim on his victory. Throughout his presidency, he was not invited by any Western state, and none of the distinguished guests visited Vienna. And this is after Austria gained unprecedented international prestige under Chancellor Kreisky in the 1950s and 60s, and in its capital Significant meetings of heads of state were held and important international conventions have been adopted.
In April of the following year, US Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that Waldheim, as a war crimes suspect, had been placed on a watch list. This prohibited the United States authorities from issuing an entry visa to him as a private individual. The ban did not allow the former head of the UN to visit the United States even after the end of his presidential term and had a life term.
It was then that an even more weighty problem sounded – after the war, Austria very quickly got rid of crimes, shifting them mainly to Germany. Although in 1945 more than half a million Austrians voluntarily admitted about their tickets as members of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
A London Observer poll conducted shortly after Waldheim came to power showed that almost 40% of his country’s citizens believed that the Jews were at least partially responsible for what happened to them during the war. And 48% of his compatriots still believed that 8,000 Jews – about 0.001% of the total population of Austria – enjoy too much economic power and influence.
Waldheim served as president until the end of his term in 1992. Although he did not run again, despite the predicted support and victory.
During this time, Eli Rosenbaum returned to the Office of Special Investigations, and from 1996 headed this division of the US Department of Justice for 13 years. Led by this lawyer, OSI established the involvement of more than 100 people in Nazi crimes.
And on June 21, US Attorney General Merrick Garland, during a visit to Kyiv, said that Rosenbaum would lead the investigation team crimes of Russians in Ukraine .
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