New Evidence on Waldheim’s Past

The World Jewish Congress today released a 1948 U.S. Army document showing that, after World War II, both the Army and the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) listed Kurt Waldheim as a suspected Nazi war criminal.

The document — a page from the Army’s “Combined Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects” (“CROWCARS”)–reports that Waldheim’s apprehension was being sought by Yugoslavia on suspicion of complicity in what the Registry listed as “murder.”

Waldheim, who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, has been at the center of a storm of controversy since the first week of March, when the Austrian magazine Profil charged that he had falsely denied membership in two Nazi organizations, including the SA (“Brownshirt”) stormtroopers.

A World Jewish Congress investigation discovered that Waldheim concealed for 40 years his wartime military service in Yugoslavia and Greece on the staff of Alexander Loehr, a notorious Nazi general who was hanged in 1947 for war crimes. Waldheim is currently a candidate for the Presidency of Austria.

DISCLOSURES IN CROWCASS LISTING

Waldheim’s CROWCASS listing notes that he served during 1944-45 a staff officer in Department IC (Intelligence) of the General Staff of Army C Group E (“Heeresgruppe E”) in Yugoslavia. Army Group E was headed by General Loehr. On March 4, the WC released a photograph taken from a German Army newspaper showing First Lieutenant Waldheim meeting with Loehr in Nazi-occupied Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in late 1944.

Waldheim’s CROWCASS listing also shows that he served as an officer in the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of the High Command of the German Armed Forces. This is the first time that Waldheim has been publicly linked to the Abwehr.

A WJC spokesman said today that his organization had located the Army CROWCARS document in public archives of the U.S. government. He expressed profound ‘dismay’ that the Army, in responding on February 20 to a Freedom of Information Act request made by the WJC for all documents “referring or relating to” Waldheim, had failed to disclose Waldheim’s listing as a war crimes suspect.

According to the WJC, the Army instead made available three innocuous documents relating to Waldheim’s post-war civil service employment in Austria, and claimed that these were the only locatable Army records pertaining to Waldheim.

Waldheim is listed on the CROWCASS document as suspect number 79/724 of the UNWCC. According to the WJC, Waldheim’s listing by the now-defunct Commission means that there should be a ‘case file’ on Waldheim among the approximately 40,000 such files contained in the Commission’s records.

Those records have long been in the custody of the UN, and access to them — even by UN member-nations — is permitted only by special permission of the UN Secretarial.

On March 6, the WJC released documents, including a 1980 letter from the U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti to Waldheim, thanking him for the agreement of the Secretarial staff to allow the U.S. Justice Department to examine these files in connection with war crimes investigations it was conducting in this country. According to the Justice Department, the UN never did make the files available to U.S. authorities; nor did the UN accede to a request for access made at same time by the Hellenic Foundation, an organization of Greek Americans that was conducting research on Nazi crimes in Greece.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, Waldheim continued to deny an alleged Nazi past. He said claims to the effect that he belonged to the SA and Nazi student groups stemmed from the fact that he went horse-riding with a student group that was later, without his knowledge, absorbed into the SA. This led Austrian Chancellor Fred Sinowatz to tell a news conference last week: “We take note of the fact that Waldheim was never a member of the SA, only his horse was.”