![]() In May 1955, Waldheim became Austrian permanent observer at the United Nations in New York in March 1956, he went to Canada as ambassador. From 1948 to 1951, he was a first secretary at Austria’s embassy in Paris and headed the personnel department in the foreign ministry. He entered the Austrian diplomatic service in 1945. Just as in West Germany, where numerous old Nazis continued their careers in the new state, nothing seemed to bar Kurt Waldheim from pursuing a glittering diplomatic career after the war’s end. From the spring of 1945 to the end of the war, he was stationed in Trieste. In 1944, during the war, Waldheim completed his law studies and attained a doctorate in jurisprudence. ![]() Waldheim was member of the mounted staff of the Nazis’ Storm Troops (Sturm Abteilung, SA) as well as belonging to the National Socialist German Student Federation (NSDStB). Waldheim was familiar with the tactical, strategic and administrative orders and was responsible for producing situation reports for the army staff. Likewise, he would have known about the transports of Italian prisoners to the German Reich, at a time when there was no state of war between Germany and Italy.Īs a staff officer in western Bosnia, Waldheim would have had knowledge of the massacres committed there of Yugoslav partisans, as well as of the destruction of numerous villages. As an officer in the staff of General Alexander Löhr in Salonika, he must have had knowledge of the deportation of approximately 40,000 Jews to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. After stays in military hospitals in Frankfurt an der Oder and Vienna, in April 1942 he was ordered to western Bosnia as a liaison officer with the occupying Italian troops.įrom April 1943, he belonged to the Army Group E, whose officer staff was quartered in Salonika in northern Greece. He participated with his division in the Russian campaign, being wounded in December 1941. At the beginning of the Second World War, Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht and from December 1940 was a second lieutenant in a Cavalry Scout Unit with the 45th Infantry Division. Then, from 1937 to 1938, he studied law in Vienna. After graduating from high school, he voluntarily signed up for military service. Waldheim was born the son of a teacher on December 21, 1918, in Lower Austria. Throughout his life, Kurt Waldheim concealed, suppressed, played down and denied his participation in the crimes of the Nazis. But like so many others, he was never called to account. Many in the Nazi regime share responsibility for these greatest crimes in mankind’s history. This “turbulent phase of history” also included the Holocaust, in which more than 6 million Jews were annihilated. ![]() This is the euphemism employed by Mexico’s UN Ambassador to describe the years 1933 to 1945, in which the Hitler regime unleashed the Second World War, and in which approximately 50 million people died. He spoke of Waldheim as a politician with “exceptional abilities,” as a diplomat who had belonged to a generation that experienced a “turbulent phase of history.” ![]() According to press reports, “the clearest allusion to Waldheim’s past during the Hitler period” came from Mexico’s UN Ambassador Claude Heller. Nobody speaking for the United Nations has recalled Waldheim’s time as a member of Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party and as an officer in the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) during World War Two. Former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel (Austrian Peoples Party, ÖVP) spoke of Waldheim as “a great fighter for peace and freedom in the world.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and diplomats from several countries expressed their sympathy for the Republic of Austria and the Waldheim family. The official obituaries have honoured him as a great Austrian and international statesman. His family was with him when he succumbed to cardiovascular failure. Last week, former UN Secretary-General and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim died at the age of 88.
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