The World Jewish Congress charged Thursday that Kurt Waldheim, when he was Secretary General of the United Nations in 1980, blocked access to UN documents and files on Nazi war criminals by an agency of the U.S. Justice Department investigating Nazi war criminals.
Israel Singer, secretary general of the WJC, told a press conference at the Halloran Hotel that the UN has an archive on some 42,000 Nazi war criminals and that access to those files requires special permission from the Secretary General.
According to Singer, Waldheim prevented the release of the documents to representatives of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) after the chief of the UN archives section had agreed, at a meeting with two OSI officials, to release them.
Singer provided a copy of a letter dated April 28, 1980 from the then-U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti to Waldheim, thanking him for permission granted by Al Erlandsson, chief of the UN archives section, and John Scott, of the UN Secretariat, to two OSI representatives, George Garand, chief historian of the OSI, and Arthur Sinai, deputy director of the OSI, to examine UN documents relating to Nazi war criminals.
But in actuality, Singer charged at the press conference, the examination did not take place and was prevented, in effect, by Waldheim. Singer said he spoke Thursday morning with Neal Sher, current head of the OSI, who said the OSI was not given access to the UN files.
CIVILETTI’S LETTER TO WALDHEIM
Civiletti’s letter to Waldheim stressed that the UN records on the subject of Nazi war criminals “may prove to be of significant assistance to the Department of Justice” which was investigating suspected war criminals living in the U.S., and said he was “therefore pleased to learn from Allan Ryan Jr., director of the Office of Special Investigations that Mr. Scott and Mr. Erlandsson have agreed to provide access to this material to representatives of the OSI” at their meeting on April 3, 1980.
Waldheim, who served two terms as UN Secretary General (1972-1981) and is now a candidate for the Presidency of Austria, was accused by the WJC this week of having been on the staff of a Werhmacht general who participated in the mass deportation of Greek Jews from Salonika to death camps in Poland in 1943.
The WJC also cited documents from the Austrian War Archives showing that Waldheim joined the National Socialist Student Organization and the Nazi SA (Storm Troopers) in 1938, shortly after the Anschluss.
Waldheim has denied membership in either organization and claims his Wehrmacht unit which served in the Balkans was not involved in the persecution or deportation of Jews and that he knew nothing of those events at the time.
Singer confirmed at the press conference that Waldheim called WJC president Edgar Bronfman to assure him that he had never been involved “in any sort of Jewish deportations or cruelties” but he conceded that he was in Salonika and in Yugoslavia during the period when Nazi atrocities against Jews occurred there, as charged by the WJC.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
