Kurt Josef Waldheim (; 21 December 1918 – 14 June 2007) was an Austrian politician and diplomat. Waldheim was the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 and the president of Austria from 1986 to 1992.
While he was running for the latter office in the 1986 election, the revelation of his service in Greece and Yugoslavia during World War II, and of his knowledge of Nazi atrocities as an intelligence officer in Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht, raised international controversy.
Early life and education Waldheim was born in Wördern (from 1972 Sankt Andrä-Wördern), near Vienna, Republic of German-Austria on 21 December 1918. He was the eldest child of Walter Watzlawik, a schoolmaster of Czech origin,Kurt Waldheim, The Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2007. and his wife Josefine Petrasch. Watzlawik (original Czech spelling Václavík) changed his name to "Waldheim" that year as the Habsburg monarchy collapsed and eventually rose to become superintendent of schools for the Tulln District, attaining the rank of Regierungsrat (government councillor). Active in the Christian Social Party, he was well regarded as a devoutly Catholic family man. Waldheim and his two younger siblings, a brother, Walther, and a sister, Gerlinde, enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing. From his youth, Waldheim was distinguished by his unusual height of . As a gymnasium student in Klosterneuburg, he excelled at languages and was a competent violinist in the school orchestra, also enjoying swimming, boating and tennis.
Although his father wanted him to study medicine, Waldheim had an aversion to the sight of blood, and had already decided to enter the foreign service. In March 1936, the Schuschnigg government passed a law mandating a period of military service for prospective civil servants. Consequently, following his graduation Waldheim volunteered for a 12-month term of enlistment in the Austrian Army, and was posted to the 1st Dragoon Regiment on his 18th birthday. In the autumn of 1937, now an army reservist, Waldheim entered the prestigious Consular Academy in Vienna on a scholarship, where he began his studies in law and diplomacy. Along with his family, Waldheim opposed the German annexation of Austria in 1938, and while actively campaigning against it in Vienna was attacked and injured by Austrian Nazis. Following the annexation, Waldheim's father was briefly arrested by the Gestapo and dismissed from his post, while Waldheim's scholarship was cancelled. He managed to continue his studies by working as a Latin and Greek tutor and borrowing funds from relatives.
Waldheim applied for membership in the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB), a division of the Nazi Party.Report of the International Historical Commission of 8 February 1988, section on "Membership in National Socialist Organizations", as cited, e.g., in Waldheim Affäre . nationalsozialismus.at He joined the Reiter-SA or Mounted SA (SA Mounted Standard 5/90) on 18 November 1938.
In March/April 1944, Waldheim received his doctorate in law from the University of Vienna. He used an approved study leave from the Balkan front (from 25 February to 16 April 1944) to complete his dissertation on the “Reich idea with Konstantin Frantz” at the Faculty of Law and Political Science. Shortly after graduating, he returned to his staff assignment under Alexander Löhr.
On 19 August 1944, he married Elisabeth Ritschel in Vienna; their first daughter, Lieselotte, was born the following year. A son, Gerhard, and another daughter, Christa, followed.
Military service in World War II In early 1941, Waldheim was conscripted into the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany, specifically to the Heer (Army), and posted to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad leader. In December, he was wounded but returned to service in 1942. His service from 1942 to 1945 was the subject of international review in 1985 and 1986. In his 1985 autobiography, he claimed that he was discharged from further service at the front and, for the remainder of the war, finished his law degree at the University of Vienna, in addition to marrying in 1944. After publication, documents and witnesses came to light that revealed Waldheim's military service continued until 1945, during which time he rose to the rank of .
Service in Yugoslavia and Greece Waldheim's functions within the staff of the German Army's Group E from 1942 until 1945, as determined by the International Commission of Historians,see page 39 of The Waldheim Report. Submitted 8 February 1988 to Federal Chancellor Dr. Franz Vranitzky were: Interpreter and liaison officer with the 5th Alpine Division (Italy) in Pljevlja, Montenegro from 22 March 1942 to July 1942; O2 (2nd Assistant Adjutant) to the 1b (General Staff Quartermaster) with Kampfgruppe West in Bosnia in June/August 1942, Interpreter with the liaison staff attached to the Italian 9th Army in Tirana in early summer 1942; O1 (1st Assistant Adjutant) to the 1a (General Staff Chief of Operations) in the German liaison staff with the Italian 11th Army and in the staff of the Army Group South in Greece in July/October 1943; and O3 (3rd Assistant Adjutant) to the 1c (General Staff Chief Intelligence Officer) officer on the staff of Army Group E in Arsakli, Kosovska Mitrovica and Sarajevo from October 1943 to January/February 1945.
By 1943, Waldheim was serving in the capacity of an aide-de-camp in Army Group E which was headed by General Alexander Löhr, who would be executed as a war criminal in 1947.Walther-Peer Fellgiebel (2000), Die Träger des Ritterkreuzes des Eisernen Kreuzes 1939–1945. Podzun-Pallas. In 1986, Waldheim said that he had served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals against local Serb civilians or of massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia. He said that he had known some things and was horrified but felt powerless.
Much historical interest has centred on Waldheim's role in Operation Kozara in 1942. According to one post-war investigator, prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred metres (yards) of Waldheim's office, and away at the Jasenovac concentration camp. Waldheim later stated that "he did not know about the murder of civilians there".
Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmachts "honour list" of those responsible for the militarily successful operation. The Nazi puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia, awarded Waldheim the Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir in silver with an oak branches cluster.Letter from Europe: Vienna, 20 June The New Yorker Decades later, during the lobbying for his election as U.N. Secretary General, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, who had led the Yugoslav Partisans during the war, awarded Waldheim one of the highest Yugoslav orders, not knowing the details of his prior military service.
Waldheim denied that he knew war crimes were taking place in Bosnia at the height of the battles between the Nazis and Tito's partisans in 1943. According to Eli Rosenbaum, in 1944, Waldheim reviewed and approved a packet of antisemitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Soviet lines, one of which ended: "Enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over."Rosenbaum, EM with Hoffer W, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up St. Martin's Press, 1993, , p. 338
In 1945, Waldheim surrendered to British forces in Carinthia, at which point he said he had fled his command post within Army Group E, where he was serving with General Alexander Löhr.
Diplomatic career After finishing his studies in law at the University of Vienna Waldheim joined the Austrian diplomatic service in 1945. Waldheim escaped denazification proceedings, as Austrian governmental forces quashed it, though it would have been required because of Waldheim's memberships in the SA's equestrian unit and in the NSDSB — Nazi Student Association.Rathkolb, Oliver. 2020. Waldheim, Kurt. 'Stolberg-Wernigerode, Otto zu, 1893-1984: Neue deutsche Biographie', Bd.: 27. Band, Vockerodt-Wettiner, Berlin, 306. Thereafter, his diplomatic career could commence.
Waldheim served as First Secretary of the Legation in Paris from 1948, and in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Vienna from 1951 to 1956. In 1956 he was made Ambassador to Canada, returning to the Ministry in 1960, after which he became the Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations in 1964. For two years beginning in 1968, he was the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs for the Austrian People's Party, before going back in 1970 as Permanent Representative to the UN. Shortly afterward he ran in the 1971 Austrian presidential election, and was defeated.
United Nations Secretary-General
After losing the presidential election, Waldheim ran for Secretary-General of the United Nations in the 1971 selection. Waldheim was supported by 11 votes, including the Soviet Union, and led the first two rounds of voting. The United States and United Kingdom initially supported him in the second round of voting. However, he was vetoed by China in the second round. Waldheim won an accidental victory in the third round of voting when those three permanent members failed to coordinate their vetoes and all abstained.: Telegram From the Mission to the United Nations to the Department of State, 22 December 1971, 0356Z. According to Finnish diplomat Risto Hyvärinen, Waldheim's former Nazi connections were already known to the Finnish officials who supported Max Jakobson for Secretary-General in the election. However, this knowledge was not used against Waldheim, because the Finns believed he would not be chosen anyway due to China having promised to veto him.
As secretary-general from 1972 onward, Waldheim opened and addressed a number of major international conferences convened under United Nations auspices. These included the third session of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (Santiago, April 1972), the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, June 1972), the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (Caracas, June 1974), the Third World Population Conference (Bucharest, August 1974) and the World Food Conference (Rome, November 1974), and the World Conference on Women, 1975 (Mexico City, June 1975). During the later, UN Resolution 3379, which considered Zionism as a form of racism and equated it with South African Apartheid, was approved by impulse of Arab countries, the Soviet bloc, and Non-Aligned Movement countries. His diplomatic efforts particularly in the Middle East were overshadowed by the diplomacy of then U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.Obituary: Kurt Waldheim BBC News (14 June 2007)
On 11 September 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin sent a telegram to Waldheim, copies of which went to Yasser Arafat and Golda Meir. In the telegram, Amin "applauded the massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich and said Germany was the most appropriate locale for this because it was where Hitler burned more than six million Jews".Israeli-Ugandan Relations in the Time of Idi Amin by Arye Oded, Jewish Political Studies Review 18:3–4 (Fall 2006) Amin also called "to expel Israel from the United Nations and to send all the Israelis to Britain, which bore the guilt for creating the Jewish state".Israeli Ugandan Relations in the Time of Idi Amin JCPA Amidst international protest, "the UN spokesman said [in his daily press conference] it was not the secretary-general's practice to comment on telegrams sent him by heads of government. He added that the secretary-general condemned any form of racial discrimination and genocide."