Bipartisan Knesset Move to Have Israel Take an Official Position on Waldheim’s Alleged Nazi Past

A consensus appeared to develop in the Knesset Wednesday for Israel to take a firm official position on allegations that former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim has a Nazi past.

Agenda motions to that effect came from across the political spectrum, from the Orthodox parties to Mapam. In response, Deputy Foreign Minister Ronnie Milo of Likud, stated that Israel “will react unequivocally and as befits the Jewish State if the allegations against Dr. Kurt Waldheim prove well-founded.”

He has been accused of being involved in atrocities against partisans, women and children in Yugoslavia and in the deportation of Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz when he served as a Wehrmacht lieutenant in the Balkans during World War II, attached to German General Headquarters.

Premier Shimon Peres has come under strong pressure from the World Jewish Congress to take a stand on Waldheim. The WJC has produced documents that seem to confirm the charges against Waldheim, who is a conservative candidate for the Presidency of Austria in the May 5 elections. Peres has stated that his government would not take a position at this time, noting that Waldheim is still a private citizen and no charges against him have been proven in a court of law.

But Zevulun Hammer of the National Religious Party called on the Knesset Wednesday “to demand that Shimon Peres and (Foreign Minister) Yitzhak Shamir act as their respective mentors — David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin — would certainly have acted…to instruct our UN Ambassador to require total condemnation by the UN of Waldheim himself.”

Chaika Grossman of Mapam, a Holocaust survivor who was a Jewish partisan leader in the Bialystok ghetto, said she expected the government of Israel to stand behind the WJC and publicly demand a full-scale inquiry into Waldheim’s wartime activities.