Joseph Lowinger, head of Greece’s Jewish community, expressed surprise and disbelief Wednesday over allegations that Kurt Waldheim participated in the deportation of 42,000 Jews from Salonika to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1943, when the future United Nations Secretary General was an officer in the Wehrmacht.
Lowinger, president of the Central Jewish Council, the representative body of Greek Jews, was referring to media reports in the United States Tuesday that Waldheim was in Salonika, where most of Greece’s 70,000 Jews lived during World War II, while the deportations were being carried out.
The World Jewish Congress also released a report Tuesday citing documents that showed Waldheim was on the staff of Gen. Alexander Loehr who was “perhaps more implicated in Jewish deportations than any other Wehrmacht commander.” Loehr was subsequently hanged as a war criminal.
“It is the first time that I have heard that Dr. Waldheim was in Thessaloniki (Salonika) and that he committed such crimes,” Lowinger said. “I don’t want to become Dr. Waldheim’s advocate, but I wonder,” he said, adding that Waldheim’s name never came up among the Nazis involved in the persecution of Greek Jews.
“How come the famous Austrian Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal does not know about Waldheim?” Lowinger asked.
Waldheim, a conservative Catholic candidate for the Presidency of Austria, has denied reports that his unit was involved in the persecution of Jews and partisans in the Balkans during World War II. He said he was on Loehr’s staff as an interpreter and that he knew nothing whatever of the deportations at the time. The Wehrmacht was not involved in such actions; which were consigned to the SS or the Gestapo, he told an interviewer in Vienna Tuesday.
Waldheim’s denial was supported by Wiesenthal, who heads the Vienna-based Nazi war crimes documentation center. He said that he had heard rumors of Waldheim’s involvement with Nazis before. But neither the Public Prosecutor’s Office in West Germany nor Eastern or Western intelligence agencies have ever produced evidence against Waldheim, Wiesenthal said.
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