A decision on whether Austrian Presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim will be barred from entering the United States because of his past war-time activities as a Wehrmacht officer is unlikely to be reached before the May 4 election, according to Attorney General Edwin Meese.
In a news conference here Monday, Meese was asked about reports last week that Neal Sher, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, had recommended in a written report that Waldheim be placed on an Immigration and Naturalization list of persons to be excluded from entering the country because of their war-time activities.
Meese told reporters that the matter “has not even started up the decision making levels in the department.” A Justice Department official said this week that the recommendation of the OSI is “routinely accepted as the position of the department.” But, the spokesman noted, “Waldheim is not a routine case.”
Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General from 1972-81, has denied that he participated in war crimes as a German officer in the Balkans during World War II, or that he had knowledge as an intelligence officer of the deportation of Greek Jews from Salonika to Nazi death camps.
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