"This much is known about Kurt Waldheim's career. He was always adaptable in his own interests...There is a report on young Kurt Waldheim from the Nazi leader in his home town, Tulln, about fifteen miles from Vienna, which says that before the Anschluss Waldheim was a diligent Catholic who opposed National Socialism in a "disgusting" way -- he had stood on street corners handing out leaflets that said "Vote Austria, Not Nazi" -- but that after the Anschluss he was a diligent soldier of the Reich and "served us well."
In fact, two weeks after the Anschluss Waldheim joined the Nazi Student Union. One week after Kristallnacht, he joined a calvary unit of the Storm Troopers -- in German, the Sturmabteilng, or S.A. The Storm Troopers had made a name for themselves in Vienna on Kristallnacht, burning synagogues...When it was time to marry, he chose a girl, Elisabeth Ritschel, who held the right new National Socialist views, and had joined the Nazi Party as soon as she was eighteen. When it was time to write his law-school thesis, he chose for a subject a German nationalist named Konstantin Frantz, whose concept of the Reich, Waldheim said, had finally been realized in the "current great conflict...with the non-European world."
Two years into the war, he got himself attached to the staff of the German High Command for the Balkans, under General Alexander Löhr, and...ended up with a King Zvonimir medal from the Croatian puppet state. He also ended up as Case No. R/N/684 in the United Nations War Crimes Commission file, charged with "murder" and with "putting hostages to death." Officially, he was a translator, an interpreter, and a "special missions staff officer." His job involved verifying and transmitting special orders, and, eventually, recommending on those orders and making suggestions of his own.
He was in Greece for the high command when forty eight thousand Jews from Salonika and Corfu were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. He was there, after the Italian surrender, when a hundred thousand Italian soldiers who were left in the country were seized and deported to German camps. He was in Yugoslavia for the High Command when massacres of thousands of partisans and their families took place. As far as the record goes, Waldheim never murdered anyone himself or personally "put to death" any hostage. "I only did my duty," he says now."
-- Jane Kramer, on Kurt Waldheim, who served two full five-year terms as Secretary-General of the United Nations (1972-1981) and was elected President of Austria in 1986 even as it was revealed that he had lied about the extent of his service in the German Army and connection to Nazi war crimes during World War II, The New Yorker, June 30, 1986.
