Virulently anti-Semitic tirades, culminating in a call to “kill the Jews,” appear in a newly-discovered package of Nazi propaganda leaflets, a package initialed by Kurt Waldheim when he served as a senior German intelligence officer during World War II, the World Jewish Congress reported in releasing the leaflets Tuesday.
The leaflets, located by WJCongress researchers at the U.S. National Archives, bear such titles as “The Jews Prepared This War” and “Onward to Berlin, Jews Shriek.” They have been turned over to the U.S. Justice Department.
Documents show the leaflets were prepared for distribution by a German army propaganda company and sent to Waldheim at the High Command Headquarters of his intelligence section. At headquarters, Waldheim received the leaflets along with a title index and a cover report dated November 28, 1944, both of which he initialed in the “03” box of the stamp of his intelligence section — the “1C/AO.”
(Waldheim acknowledged his “03” intelligence status in his memorandum to the United States Justice Department of April 6, 1986. The 03 “was the deputy of the chief intelligence officer responsible for all operational intelligence and the control of the intelligence staff,” according to the declassified study, “German Military Intelligence,” by the Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. War Department, 1946.)
Sixty-five titles were listed on the master index of propaganda leaflets that Waldheim initialed and dated. The cover report which he also initialed states that 80,000 copies of the leaflets had been printed and that “repeat printings are planned.”
EXAMPLES OF ANTI-SEMITIC VENOM
According to the cover report, thousands of copies of the leaflets were to be dropped behind enemy lines to Russian soldiers, in an attempt to get them to defect to the German side. The leaflets include such outpourings of anti-Semitic venom as the following:
“Cursed be the Jews who sit over the necks of our relatives in the rear and suck their blood”; “Only the German people did right when it freed itself from the accursed Jews”; “All of us must seriously consider going over to the German people, to fight with it against Jewish Bolshevism”; and, “The Jews prepared this war. Jews got it onto our backs. Jews do not want it to end.”
One of the leaflets concludes: “Who, wherever you move into the Balkans, showed the greatest enthusiasm? The Jews. Enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over.”
Another captured Nazi war document — a secret organizational chart of the German High Command in the Balkans — shows that “Waldheim’s intelligence section (“IC/AO”) had major propaganda responsibilities. The document shows that the propaganda company that printed the anti-Semitic leaflets reported directly to the “IC/AO.”
That same propaganda company was responsible for publishing a front-page photo of Waldheim with his commanding General, Alexander Loehr, which appeared in the German army newspaper in the Balkans. Loehr was hanged as a war criminal in 1947.
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.
