The World Jewish Congress will publish a “White Book” summarizing the case against Kurt Waldheim on Tuesday, the day Waldheim is inaugurated as President of Austria.
“Afterwards, it will be up to the historians to carry on,” Israel Singer, Secretary General of the WJC, said with respect to Waldheim’s alleged Nazi past. The WJC over the last four months has introduced massive documentary evidence implicating Waldheim in atrocities against civilians and the deportation of Greek Jews when he was a Wehrmacht intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War II.
Despite the evidence, Waldheim was elected by a landslide vote last June 8. According to Singer, the Austrian press concealed many of the facts brought to light. “I can live with the fact that there is a country I like with a chief of state I dislike,” Singer said, “but up to now the Austrians don’t know all the facts of the Waldheim documents.”
He said some of Waldheim’s supporters had depicted him as a symbol of Austria’s enemies and a villain to divert attention from the past. “The result was a successful Presidential campaign but also a terrible defeat for Austria’s image,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Kurier.
Singer said he would go to Israel shortly for talks with Premier Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir to discuss “common lines” of policy in the Waldheim affair.
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.
