Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel said here Friday that if Austrian President Kurt Waldheim “has any conscience left he must resign.”
Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, spoke at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Waldheim’s “election by the Austrian people is a stain on Austria and all of mankind,” he said. “I don’t know why this man doesn’t resign. If he has any conscience left he must resign.”
Wiesel added, “The Presidency is, in the first place, a moral position, and a man with a Nazi past like Waldheim cannot hold an office like that.” Waldheim, who served two terms as United Nations Secretary General, was elected to the Presidency of Austria last June 8 by a landslide vote, despite evidence implicating him in atrocities when he served as a Wehrmacht intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War II.
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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.
