Austrian Presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim conceded for the first time in an interview published here Thursday that he was aware of atrocities committed against Yugoslav partisans, though he remained insistent that he was not involved in the atrocities.
Waldheim, the 67-year-old former United Nations Secretary General, also said in the interview with The New York Times that he was unaware of the deportation of Greek Jews from Salonika, and also from Vienna, even though he visited the Austrian capital during the war.
“I only heard that there were measures against Jews, that they were taken away without knowing where to — we didn’t know. But I didn’t know it was such a mass affair,” he said of the deportation of Jews from Vienna, which started in 1939.
Waldheim, the conservative Peoples Party candidate in next month’s Austrian elections, said he was aware of atrocities against Yugoslav partisans while he was an officer preparing daily battlefield reports in the Balkans. “I knew that,” he said, “but I also knew that many German soldiers were trapped and executed in a similar way.”
‘I HAVE A CLEAN CONSCIENCE’
“It was a nasty, dirty confrontation, although I have to add immediately I was far away from these atrocities, and I just got the reports. I had to forward them, put them together, to forward to the high command. I have a clean conscience, that’s why I’m very relaxed, very relaxed, although I tell you in an emotional way.”
Despite Waldheim’s assertions that he had no knowledge of the deportation of thousands of Jews from Salonika, the head of that Jewish community, Leon Benmajor, said in an interview in a television documentary that it was “a monstrous lie that Waldheim did not know of the fate of the Jews of Salonika.” The special documentary on Greek Jews during the war was broadcast in Rome earlier this week.
On April 24, 1943, said Benmajor, a Holocaust survivor, 3,000 Jews had to cross the entire city to the ghetto from where they were then deported. “Even the stones of Salonika knew of the drama of the Jews,” he added. “Is it possible that Waldheim did not see the yellow stars on our chests, the Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Germans, the shops displaying Jewish property signs, and the Nazis storming into our homes?
“Even a simple soldier could have observed these things, even a simple German, and Waldheim was much more. He was a secretary to the General of the Nazi troops stationed five kilometers from Salonika,” Benmajor continued. “This lie conceals other things.” If definitive proof is gathered, Waldheim should be put on trial for war crimes, Benmajor said.
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