American experts familiar with the Kurt Waldheim case have expressed strong reservations about the propriety of a cable television special probing the Austrian president’s guilt for wartime crimes.
The Home Box Office program “Waldheim: A Commission of Inquiry,” which was to premier in several countries worldwide Sunday night, is an unusual television “trial” of a living person for alleged wartime crimes not tried by any other court.
According to HBO. 20 researchers working in 19 different countries located more than 10,000 pages of material on the Waldheim case, much of which they claim is newly uncovered and unpublished.
Evidence against Waldheim was presented in front of a panel of five respected judges from various Western countries. The eight-day hearing was to culminate with the judges rendering a verdict on whether Waldheim “wrongly participated in acts which were contrary to the international laws of war” while serving as a German army intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War II.
The judges’ verdict, which has been kept secret, was to be broadcast by satellite from London on Sunday at 11 p.m. British time.
The program is a co-production of HBO and Thames Television in London. Following its three-and-a-half-hour debut Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, a special two-and-a-half-hour program will be telecast June 9, 13, 17, 25 and 28. The program is an HBO exclusive.
The head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, Neal Sher, criticized the television trial as being “troubling.”
‘DON’T TRY A MAN ON TELEVISION’
“Generally, you don’t try a man on television,” he said in a telephone interview. “No matter how it’s packaged, it’s not a trial, it’s still television. But to put it in a courtroom setting, I think it’s demeaning to what my office does.”
Sher declined the request of HBO researchers for any information the OSI had on Waldheim. The Austrian president was placed on the U.S. “Watch List” of undesirable aliens who may not enter the country.
Sher drew attention to the difficulty of verifying testimony provided by witnesses in a television forum. Noting that no witnesses called for the program testified under oath, he asked, “If a witness lies, what do you do with him? Could you subpoena documents? The question is, how was the information analyzed?”
“Regardless of the amount of resources, the fact is they have no subpoena power, nothing to guarantee perjury provisions,” he said.
Sher said he had no intention of watching the broadcast. But he added that if it had been produced as a documentary, “I would have absolutely no problem.”
Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman was concerned that a “verdict” of “insufficient evidence to stand trial” could jeopardize Waldheim’s inclusion on the U.S. Watch List, according to a spokesperson. It was Holtzman who, as a member of Congress 10 years ago, authored legislation denying entry to the United States to anyone who had abetted the Nazis.
But one official familiar with the Waldheim case had no such qualms. Allan Ryan Jr., Sher’s predecessor as head of OSI, served as Waldheim’s “prosecutor” in the unusual trial.
CHANCE TO PROVIDE INFORMATION
“I would be a lot more concerned about usurping a government’s function if there were a court out there who I thought would try him,” Ryan said. He said he saw the program as an opportunity to disseminate information on Waldheim to the public.
Ryan was present at an abridged premier of the program Thursday night at the Jewish Museum in New York. During the 90 minutes of video seen that night, two former German army associates of Waldheim disclaimed any knowledge of massacres against Greek civilians or Italian soldiers.
This conflicted with witnesses’ claims that the German army’s Mountain Division brutally killed civilians and deported soldiers and Jews with no conformity to international law.
Witnesses for the prosecution called include a Greek survivor of the Komeno massacre; a British legal expert, a British historian and a West German historian.
Telford Taylor, U.S. chief prosecution counsel at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, oversaw legal proceedings for the “trial.” Taylor, who was present at the premier Thursday, said that the “Waldheim question is very much broader than the film endeavors.”
He called the film “the most unique and the best feature. This could have been done with actors, Instead, it was done with five of the most prestigious judges.”
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.
