Waldheim's Death Shouldn't Pass Unnoticed

In 2004, I visited Vienna – a marvelous city, rivaling Paris’ beauty – where I saw this sculpture in the large plaza in front of the opera house. I got into conversation with two well-dressed, middle-aged Austrian men about it, who pointed out the nearby sign, which included this description:

After 12 May 1938, Jewish citizens of Vienna were forced to scrub the streets that had been smeared with slogans. The bronze rendering of a kneeling street-washing Jew is a reminder of the degradation and humiliation that preceded merciless persecution.

The plaza was dedicated on November 24, 1988.

We chatted, they taking pride in the plaza and its sculptures. I then pointed at a building’s balcony about a block away, from which Hitler addressed over a million cheering Austrians after the Anschluss (political union of Germany and Austria in 1938). They replied, “We don’t discuss that.”

Neither did the rest of the world, for decades after World War II, and universal knowledge of the Holocaust.

In the emerging Cold War’s scrabble for position, as the New York Times’ obituary of former U.N. Secretary General and former President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, says:

With the end of World War II, the Allies designated Austria as a nation invaded by the Nazis rather than Germany’s willing partner. The country’s new status helped assuage the fears of thousands of Austrian combatants like Mr. Waldheim. Moreover, Austria remained neutral in the growing cold war between East and West.

Kurt Waldheim’s record of direct involvement in Nazi slaughter of Jews and of others who resisted or were deemed threats in the Balkans was ignored by both the Russians and the United States, who both had evidence in their possession immediately after the war. Even:

By early 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission listed him as a suspected war criminal subject to trial. Yet no government pressed to bring Mr. Waldheim to account or even to disclose his history.

It was not until these and additional records were revealed in 1985, first by rival politicians in Austria and then further investigated and publicized by the World Jewish Congress, that the world woke up. But, “On June 8, 1986, in a two-round election, Mr. Waldheim won the runoff for Austria’s presidency with 53.9 percent of the 4.7 million votes cast. “

Waldheim maintained that he served in order to avoid persecution by the Nazis for his anti-Nazi father. However, as the scholar who investigated him said in his 1988 tome: “The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes.” Going further, Richard Fisk, (Wikipedia bio) a British reporter known for his unflinching published opposition to any person, event or country he deems deficient of respect for human rights (though to extremes of heavy criticism of Israel and being an interviewing chum of Osama bin Laden), says:

Waldheim - how his friends would prefer that they didn't read these words this morning - was based at a town called Banja Luka, a market town where Serbs and Jews and communist Croatians were murdered en masse, hanged like thrushes from mass gallows or raped to death in the nearby Jasenovac extermination camp. Waldheim would have us believe that he knew nothing of all this, that he was a mere intelligence officer for Army Group E of the Wehrmacht, whose commander, Löhr, just happened to be tried for war crimes after the Second World War….

I even visited his interrogation office, next to an execution pit wherein Serbs and Jews were massacred daily. Did the rifle shots not disturb Kurt Waldheim's concentration? Oh, what it must have been to have the peace and quiet of the UN headquarters on the East River. …

In 1987, King Hussein took Waldheim to the heights of Um Queiss to overlook the Israeli-occupied West Bank and awarded him the Hussein bin Ali medal - named after Hussein's grandfather. The Plucky Little King praised Waldheim for his patriotism, integrity, wisdom and "noble human values". General Löhr, I should add - Waldheim's superior officer in Yugoslavia - was hanged as a war criminal.

Whether a war criminal or a willing accomplice of war criminals, Waldheim skated away from judgement for 40-years, with the complicity of and support from those who found him useful to their immediate ends.

His death shouldn’t be allowed to pass without reflecting on other and current complicities by those who would sacrifice millions of innocents to murderous tyrants and terrorists, for immediate ease or avoidance of admitting or consciousness of the consequences.