Former Chancellor Bruno Kreisky of Austria has admitted he erred when he proposed Kurt Waldheim for the office of United Nations secretary general in the early 1970s.
The World Jewish Congress reports that Kreisky told a packed lecture audience at a Vienna concert hall that he had failed to gather detailed information about Waldheim’s Nazi past.
Kreisky, a leader of the Austrian Socialist Party and a non-practicing Jew, served as chancellor from 1970-83. Waldheim was elected president of Austria in July 1986, having served as U.N. secretary general from 1972-82.
“I proposed and supported the candidacy of an official of the Foreign Ministry (Waldheim) for the job of U.N. secretary general who quite obviously had not told the truth about himself,” Kreisky said.
He hinted that the United States and the Soviet Union, which both supported Waldheim for secretary general, knew more about his past than he had.
Waldheim concealed for 40 years the fact that he had been an intelligence officer with the German army in the Balkans during World War II. His unit was involved in the deportation of Greek Jews and atrocities against partisans and civilians in Yugoslavia. Its commanding general was hanged as a war criminal in 1947.
Waldheim’s connection was exposed during his presidential election campaign, largely through the efforts of the World Jewish Congress. He won a landslide victory. It emerged later that Waldheim’s name is in the files of the Allied War Crimes Commission, among some 25,000 Class A suspects on whom there is sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution.
The files of the long defunct commission were turned over to the United Nations when its investigations were completed, and are now kept at the U.N. archives in midtown Manhattan.
Until a week ago they were accessible only to governments of member states. But after persistent appeals by Israel, the 17 former members of the war crimes commission agreed to open the files containing dossiers on more than 40,000 Nazi war criminals, to scholars, researchers, historians and journalists.
Waldheim has been placed on the “watch list” of the U.S. Department of Justice as an alien to be denied admission to the U.S.
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