A decision on whether Austrian Presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim will be barred from entering the United States because of his past war-time activities as a Wehrmacht officer is unlikely to be reached before the May 4 election, according to Attorney General Edwin Meese.
In a news conference here Monday, Meese was asked about reports last week that Neal Sher, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, had recommended in a written report that Waldheim be placed on an Immigration and Naturalization list of persons to be excluded from entering the country because of their war-time activities.
Meese told reporters that the matter “has not even started up the decision making levels in the department.” A Justice Department official said this week that the recommendation of the OSI is “routinely accepted as the position of the department.” But, the spokesman noted, “Waldheim is not a routine case.”
Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General from 1972-81, has denied that he participated in war crimes as a German officer in the Balkans during World War II, or that he had knowledge as an intelligence officer of the deportation of Greek Jews from Salonika to Nazi death camps.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
