Global Policy Forum

By Jonathan Kandell

Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes were exposed late in his career, died yesterday at his home in Vienna. He was 88. His death was announced by his wife, Elisabeth, and the office of the Austrian president, Heinz Fischer. The cause was heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported.

It was never proved that Mr. Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II. But he was a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between 1942 and 1944. Mr. Waldheim concealed his wartime service in the Balkans, saying his military career ended in 1942, after he was wounded on the Russian front. But more than four decades later, his assertions were contradicted by witnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Mr. Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations.

"Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime," wrote Prof. Robert Edwin Herzstein of the University of South Carolina, a historian whose archival research was crucial in uncovering Mr. Waldheim's Nazi past. "But this non-guilt must not be confused with innocence. 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."

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. A former Yugoslav intelligence official, Anton Kolendic, said he informed his Soviet counterparts "in late 1947 or 1948" that his government was seeking Mr. Waldheim on suspicion of involvement in war crimes. But the Russians did nothing. And according to a bipartisan letter from Congress sent to President Bill Clinton, the Central Intelligence Agency was aware of Mr. Waldheim's wartime history years before he stood for election as secretary general but chose to conceal it. Mr. Waldheim, who had reached the pinnacle of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, went on to serve two terms, from 1972 to 1982.

In Race for President, the Secret Comes Out

It was not until he ran for president of Austria in 1986 that his wartime past became widely known. During his campaign, political opponents, investigative journalists, historians and the World Jewish Congress uncovered archival evidence of Mr. Waldheim's involvement with the Nazi movement as a student and his wartime role in the Balkans.

But the revelations were met by a nationalist, anti-Semitic backlash in Austria that aided Mr. Waldheim's election. Many Austrians apparently viewed Mr. Waldheim's life as a parable of their own. They identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and forced into their military service. He became a soldier in Hitler's army, Mr. Waldheim insisted, "just as hundreds of thousands of other Austrians did their duty."

Kurt Waldheim was born on Dec. 21, 1918, in St. Andrä-Wí¶rdern, a village near Vienna. His father, Walter, the son of an impoverished blacksmith, became the local school superintendent and married a daughter of the mayor. Thanks to his parents' middle-class standing, Kurt and his brother and sister endured few economic deprivations during the 1920s, when Austria was a "defeated, ruined, truncated remnant of the former Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire," Mr. Waldheim wrote in his 1985 memoir, "In the Eye of the Storm."

In March 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered his army into Austria and annexed the country. Because of his anti-Nazi sympathies, Walter Waldheim was twice arrested by the Gestapo and lost his job. "Our family was under constant surveillance," Kurt Waldheim wrote. "We lived in daily apprehension." Mr. Waldheim asserted that he had never belonged to a Nazi-affiliated group. But in fact, at 19, he joined the National Socialist German Students League, a Nazi youth organization. Then, in November 1938, he enrolled in the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the paramilitary Nazi organization of storm troopers known as the Brownshirts.

Told in 1986 that documents proved he had joined these Nazi groups, Mr. Waldheim dismissed their significance, arguing that they were meant to protect him and his family. He said in his memoir that he had enlisted in the German Army to ward off suspicion of his anti-Nazi opinions. "A civilian whose politics and activities were under scrutiny was better off as a soldier," Mr. Waldheim wrote. "In the army, there was much less harassment of those known to disapprove of Nazism, and I had no further trouble." In the war, Mr. Waldheim was assigned to the Russian front as a first lieutenant. He suffered a severe ankle wound from a grenade fragment in December 1941 and was sent back to Austria to recover. By his account, his wound ended his military service in 1942, allowing him to complete his law studies.

In fact, as soon as his ankle recovered sufficiently, he was returned to active service, as an intelligence officer in the Balkans. He was assigned to the 714th Infantry Division under the command of the notorious Gen. Friedrich Stahl, who led the Germans and their Croatian allies in an operation that slaughtered more than 60,000 suspected Yugoslav Partisans and their family members at Kozara, in western Bosnia, in 1942. Lieutenant Waldheim had a significant enough role in the operation to have his name inscribed on a divisional roll of honor. The Croatians awarded him the Silver Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir "for courage in the battle against rebels in West Bosnia."

When his wartime service in the Balkans was disclosed in 1986, Mr. Waldheim insisted at first that he had never been near Kozara. When documents proved the contrary, he played down any involvement in the massacre and told The Associated Press that the Zvonimir medal was handed out "like chocolates" to all German officers. Other documents showed that Mr. Waldheim had served as a staff officer with a large military unit that executed thousands of Partisans and noncombatants in Montenegro and eastern Macedonia, and killed Allied commandos who had been taken prisoner. Its commander, Gen. Alexander Lí¶hr, was an Austrian who was put to death in Yugoslavia in 1947 for war crimes.

Mr. Waldheim was also stationed in Greece, just outside Salonika, where more than 60,000 Jews were shipped off to Auschwitz. Only 10,000 survived. "I never heard or learned anything of this while I was there," Mr. Waldheim said in 1986 in an interview with The New York Times. But according to Professor Herzstein, the historian, Mr. Waldheim prepared numerous reports on the deportations for his superiors, including General Lí¶hr.

"It is hard to believe," Mr. Herzstein wrote in "Waldheim: The Missing Years," a 1988 book on his investigations, that "this ambitious young staff officer, whose success had been based in large part on his ability to keep abreast of what was going on, could have failed to notice that most of the Jewish community of Salonika - nearly a third of the city's population - had been shipped off to Auschwitz." He added, "As that officer, Kurt Waldheim served as an efficient and effective cog in the machinery of genocide."

On leave between his Balkan assignments, Mr. Waldheim managed to marry Elisabeth Ritschel and complete his law degree thesis at the University of Vienna in 1944. His wife, also a law student, was an ardent Nazi who before the war had renounced her Roman Catholic faith and joined the League of German Maidens, the young women's equivalent of the Hitler Youth. She applied for Nazi Party membership as soon as she was old enough, and was accepted in 1941.

The Waldheims had two daughters, Liselotte and Christa, and a son, Gerhard, who became an active defender of his father when revelations of his Nazi past surfaced in 1986. They, along with their mother, survive Mr. Waldheim. 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.

A Political Career Begins in a Postwar Calm

In December 1945, Mr. Waldheim became a personal assistant to Karl Gruber, who was soon appointed foreign minister. Mr. Waldheim worked closely with Mr. Gruber on a bitter border dispute with Yugoslavia, by then a Communist country under the leadership of Tito, the Partisans' wartime commander. Mr. Waldheim was almost undone by his role in the dispute. In September 1947, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry discovered that he had been an intelligence officer in a German Army unit involved in atrocities against the Partisans. The next year, the Yugoslavs had Mr. Waldheim's name added to the United Nations War Crimes Commission list of suspected war criminals, a procedure that often led to extradition and trial. But cold war events apparently conspired to save Mr. Waldheim. Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union, declared its neutrality and, as part of its realignment, agreed to drop its claims on Austrian territory. It also appeared to have no further interest in extraditing Mr. Waldheim or even exposing his past.

Both the Americans and the Russians were aware of Mr. Waldheim's wartime record. Mr. Kolendic, the former Yugoslav intelligence official, told The New York Times in 1986 that he had handed over to a senior Soviet intelligence officer a list of "about 25 or 27" Austrians sought for war crimes, including Mr. Waldheim. It is unclear why American intelligence officials decided not to expose Mr. Waldheim's wartime record early in his diplomatic career. But the C.I.A.'s failure to do so aroused Congressional resentment. "We now know that our government had in its possession information and documents on Kurt Waldheim," a bipartisan group of 59 legislators wrote to President Clinton. "There is no more onerous example of the harm these hidden files can cause than the fact that Kurt Waldheim was elected secretary general of the United Nations while the Central Intelligence Agency concealed his wartime past."

By 1951, Mr. Waldheim was chief of the personnel division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Foreign Minister Gruber lost his post in 1954, but Mr. Waldheim was already cultivating another mentor and rising star in the Austrian government - Bruno Kreisky, a socialist and a Jew who had survived the war by fleeing to Sweden. In 1955, Mr. Waldheim was named Austria's first representative to the United Nations. In 1968, Mr. Waldheim became foreign minister under Chancellor Josef Klaus. Soon he traveled to Belgrade, where Tito bestowed upon him the Order of the Grand Cross of the Yugoslav Flag, citing his efforts to improve relations between the two countries. Mr. Waldheim was now in the singular position of having been decorated by both the Fascist wartime authorities and the postwar Communist government in Yugoslavia.

Three years later, when U Thant stepped down as secretary general, the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union backed Mr. Waldheim for the post. He became secretary general in 1972 and won another five-year term in 1977. Mr. Waldheim was criticized as being ineffective and too willing to yield to pressure. Western countries complained that he had failed to press Vietnam to abandon its military occupation of Cambodia.

The United States and Israel said he was not being evenhanded in the Middle East. He endorsed Palestinian statehood without mentioning Israel's right to exist, and when an Israeli commando unit staged its daring rescue of hostages at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976, Mr. Waldheim called the action "a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state." Mr. Waldheim retired from the United Nations after it became clear that he did not have enough support for his bid for a third term. He returned to Austria and retired from the Foreign Ministry in 1984.

If Mr. Waldheim had stayed away from public office at this point, his Nazi past would probably never have been revealed. But in 1985 he sought the largely ceremonial post of president of Austria, running as the candidate of the right-wing People's Party. Rival socialist politicians began to circulate stories about Mr. Waldheim's past, and archival material made its way into a leading magazine, Profil. Its interest aroused, the World Jewish Congress asked Professor Herzstein, the scholar of Nazi history, to comb the National Archives in Washington for evidence of Mr. Waldheim's possible involvement in war crimes.

On March 4, 1986, a Times reporter, John Tagliabue, wrote an article from Vienna detailing documentary evidence about Mr. Waldheim's wartime service in the Balkans and his prewar Nazi associations. And on March 25, the World Jewish Congress announced Mr. Herzstein's findings at a news conference in New York. The revelations set off a fierce debate in Austria. Socialists tried to convince voters that a Waldheim victory would stain Austria's reputation abroad. But conservatives convinced much of the electorate that the accusations against Mr. Waldheim were an intolerable interference by foreigners in Austrian internal affairs. Campaign posters reflected the backlash, asserting under images of Waldheim, "Now More Than Ever." Hate mail threatened violence against Austrian Jews if Mr. Waldheim lost.

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. But the controversy over his past did not subside. On April 28, 1987, the Justice Department barred Mr. Waldheim from entering the United States after determining that he had "assisted or participated in" the deportation, mistreatment and execution of civilians and Allied soldiers in World War II. At Mr. Waldheim's request, the Austrian government appointed a commission of historians from more than a half-dozen countries to investigate the accusations. On Feb. 8, 1988, the panel said it had no evidence that Mr. Waldheim was guilty of war crimes. But it concluded that he must have been aware of the atrocities committed around him and that by doing nothing about the crimes, he had facilitated them.

Rejecting a Hint of Guilt, Refusing to Offer Regrets

Mr. Waldheim maintained that he was guiltless. He never expressed remorse or regret for his Balkan service or for his efforts to hide it. Mr. Waldheim did not seek a second six-year term when his presidency ended in 1992. In a 1996 autobiography, "The Answer," he contended that his banishment from the United States had resulted from a conspiracy by American Jews, who he said had pressed the Reagan administration to send a "useful signal" to Jewish voters in the 1988 presidential campaign.

And throughout his later years, Mr. Waldheim portrayed himself as an ordinary citizen who had been caught up in a maelstrom.

"Waldheim was clearly not a psychopath like Dr. Josef Mengele nor a hate-filled racist like Adolf Hitler," Professor Herzstein wrote. "His very ordinariness, in fact, may be the most important thing about him. For if history teaches us anything, it is that the Hitlers and the Mengeles could never have accomplished their atrocious deeds by themselves. "It took hundreds of thousands of ordinary men - well-meaning but ambitious men like Kurt Waldheim - to make the Third Reich possible."

Correction: June 20, 2007

An obituary on Friday about Kurt Waldheim, the former diplomat and president of Austria, misstated the level of support he had in 1981 in his unsuccessful bid for a third term as secretary general of the United Nations. Although he retired from the United Nations after failing to win a unanimous vote of the five permanent members with veto power, his candidacy did indeed win some support, including that of the United States and the Soviet Union; it did not lack support entirely. Also, the obituary misidentified the chancellor of Austria whom Mr. Waldheim served under as foreign minister, from 1968 to 1970. He was Josef Klaus - not Bruno Kreisky, who became chancellor in 1970.