bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1988), pp. 14–15
Amid all the brouhaha over the World War II activities of Kurt Waldheim, President of Austria and former two-term Secretary General of the United Nations, it seems to have been forgotten that Canada was the first country to which Austria appointed him on ambassadorial assignment and that the career record he presented us here might well have foreshadowed the ominous events to come. In pulling the wool successfully over Ottawa’s eyes, he went on for three decades of dissimulation and outright falsification – from the time he set foot in Ottawa in 1956 to the publication of his memoirs a couple of years ago.
Because it still seems unlikely — or certainly has not yet been proven – that Dr. Waldheim directly committed war crimes, it is puzzling to contemplate why he went to such lengths and such risks to obfuscate his wartime record. And it is particulary puzzling in the light of his insistence on the innocuousness of his military activities. Would his war record have handicapped his attainment of such high national international office? Or would the knowledge, now belatedly unearthed by historians, have transmuted entirely his astonishing career?
From the early postwar years up to 1956, Austria had maintained a small diplomatic mission in Ottawa headed by a chargé d’affaires, with its Ambassador in Washington accredited additionally to Canada. In early 1956, Vienna informed the Department of External Affairs that it would like to raise the level of its representation here by appointing a full-time Minister, who would reside in Ottawa
Vienna proposed Dr. Waldheim for this new post and on January 16, 1956, submitted a curriculum vitae and requested the customary approval for the appointment from External. The c.v. noted that Waldheim had served in Vienna during 1951-55 as “Director of the Personnel Section of the Federal Chancellery, Department of External Affairs”, from which it might well have been inferred that the biographical note for such a person would have been meticulously prepared. It began:
Dr. Kurt Waldheim. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary. Born December 21st, 1918. Married. Consular Academy of Vienna, legal studies at the University of Vienna, Doctor of Law 1944. Military service: 1936-37, 1939-45. Legal practice at the District Court of Appeal, Vienna, 1940-45. Entered the Austrian foreign service November 1945.
No one in Ottawa queried the anomaly arising from the juxtaposed c.v. entries “military service 1939-45” and “legal practice at the District Court of Appeal, Vienna, 1940-45”, and External Affairs approved the appointment without question. Perhaps someone had a fleeting doubt, or was puzzled, because the wording of External’s subsequent biographical note, prepared for the Governor General on the occasion of Waldheim’s presentation of credentials, was quite cautious: “. …in 1940 (he) finished law studies at the University of Vienna. After the end of World War II, Dr. Waldheim entered the Austrian Foreign Ministry”
Dr. Waldheim presented his credentials to Vincent Massey on March 28, 1956. Iwo years later, Austria raised its mission in Ottawa to the rank of embassy and Waldheim’s rank was accordingly raised to ambassador. He served two more years here and in June 1960 was re-assigned to his Ministry in Vienna, and subsequently rose to become Minister of Foreign Affairs.
What External Affairs in Ottawa did not know in agreeing to Waldheim’s appointment, and what he successfully concealed in his curriculum vitae and in his four-year stay in Canada, were the basic facts of his war record. He first saw service with the German Army in occupied France, where he was commissioned. In 1941, he took part in the Nazi invasion of the USSR, receiving the Iron Cross – and praise from his commander, who was later executed as a war criminal. Wounded in the leg by a grenade splinter in Russia, Waldheim was repatriated to Vienna and after several months regained his health. In 1942, he was assigned to the German High Command in Belgrade, where he served as an intelligence officer; the Nazi Army there, harassed by Yugoslav partisan resistance, engaged in a campaign of atrocities throughout the Balkans, including indiscriminate massacres of whole villages, massive deportations to Nazi death and slave labour camps, and systematic depopulation. In 1943, Waldheim was given some study leave in Vienna, after which he was re-assigned to the Balkans, serving until the end of the war as a Nazi liaison officer at Italian Fascist headquarters in Salonika and Athens, i.e. in the areas where some of the war’s worst atrocities were perpetrated
If Waldheim dissimulated about his war years in his curriculum vitae for Ottawa, he went even further when he received his first appointment, beginning in 1914, as Secretary General of the United Nations where, it might well have been assumed, his career would have been subject to the most rigorous scrutiny; Waldheim’s main competition for the U.N. post was Max Jacobsen, Finland’s highly-regarded Ambassador to the United Nations, who was favoured by the Western nations. The UN’s official announcement about Waldheim’s career following his election makes no mention of war service whatsoever and clearly infers that Waldheim was occupied by the study of law during the years of World War II: “The Secretary General was born at Sankt Andra-Wordern, near Vienna, Austria, on 21 December 1918. He graduated from the University of Vienna as a Doctor of Jurisprudence in 1944. He is also a graduate of the Vienna Consular Academy. Mr. Waldheim joined • the Austrian diplomatic service in 1945…
Even more flagrant is the fabrication that Dr. Waldheim wrote in his recent autobiography “In the Eye of the Storm — The Memoirs of Kurt Waldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations 1972-82” (Weidenfeld, London, 1985). He mentions returning from the Eastern Front with a leg wound in 1941, but then goes on to stay: “…to my undisguised relief (I was dis. charged from further service at the front. I made a formal request to be permitted to resume my law studies and take my Master’s degree and, rather to my surprise, this was granted. I still had my pay as a lieutenant and this helped to see me through.” Reinforcing this lie, he then goes on to describe all the work and travel required to secure his higher degree.
That’s all. Just law study in Vienna. No mention of Belgrade, Salonika, Athens, of the dreadful events at Kozara in Bosnia where some 90,000 Yugoslavs, many of them women and children, were put to death. No mention of his role as Nazi intelligence officer. Just law study in Vienna; he did receive his Doctorate in Law in 1944.
Now President of Austria, Dr. Waldheim has ignored domestic pressures on him to resign after a panel of military historians, appointed by the Austrian Government, concluded that he must have been aware of war crimes while serving in the Balkans but did nothing in protest or to impede them and later lied to conceal his military past; and while they found no evidence that Waldheim himself was guilty of war crimes, he “repeatedly assisted in connection with illegal actions and thereby facilited their execution.”
The U.S. Department of Justice has been less reticent. After a year’s investigation it stated, on April 27 last year, that “the available evidence demonstrates that under established legal principles, Waldheim, during his service with the German Army in World War II, assisted or otherwise participated in the following persecutory activities: the transfer of civilian prisoners to the S.S. for exploitation as slave labor; the mass deportation of civilians to concentration and death camps; the deportation of Jews from Greek islands and Banja Luka, Yugoslavia, to concentration and death camps; the utilization of anti-Semitic propaganda; the mistreatment and execution of Allied prisoners, and reprisal executions of hostages and other civilians.” The Simon Wiesenthal Documentation Centre — which is located in Vienna — has not accused Waldheim of war crimes.
All this raises the intriguing question of why Dr. Waldheim — from his curriculum vitae for Canada in the fifties to his memoirs in the eighties — went to such risky lengths to lie about his war years. Had the truth been known, would Canada have given its agreement to Austria’s proposal to appoint him as its first resident Head of Mission in Ottawa? Would the members of the United Nations have agreed to his appointment — and re-appointment — to two five-year terms as U.N. Secretary General?
One of the U.N.’s most highly regarded officials from its earliest days, Britain’s Brian Urquhart, well known to the Canadian military and to External Affairs because of his long responsibility for United Nations peacekeeping operations, served directly under and supported Waldheim for ten years as a U.N. Under-Secretary-General. Urquhart, now Sir Brian, recently published his own memoirs of four decades of U.N. service, and at a time when the international outrage over Waldheim’s misrepresentation of his war record was reaching a crescendo. In his “A Life in Peace and War” (Harper, New York, 1987) Urquhart, the quintessence of cautious discernment and sobriety of jugement, writes:
“Waldheim, it now seems clear, lied for forty years about his war record… This seems to me a far greater disqualification for responsible office, either national or international, than the currently available evidence of his doings as an officer of Hitler’s army.”
Last summer direct allegations — the first of their kind — linking Dr. Waldheim to the execution of a British officer in Greece were made by a British Member of Parliament (who once worked for Waldheim at the U.N.) and by a British historian and former Cabinet Minister who had commanded Allied operations in support of the Greek Resistance in World War II. The outcome of the Thatcher Government’s inquiry into these allegations should help scholars reach a final judgement in the strange case of Kurt Waldheim.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1988), pp. 14–15. Read the rest of this issue →
