Premier Andreas Papandreou of Greece has been urged to launch an investigation into allegations implicating Austrian Presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim in the slaughter and deportation of Greek citizens while the former UN Secretary General was based near Salonika as a Wehrmacht officer.
In a cable to the Greek Premier, James Demos, president of the Hellenic Freedom Foundation in the United States, voiced the concern of many Greek Americans that the matter be handled properly and urged that the Papandreou government investigate what role, if any, Waldheim played “in the slaughtering of over six thousand Greek Jews, Cretans and partisans on Crete” as well as in the deportation of Greek citizens from Thessaloniki and other parts of Greece to concentration camps.”
Demos also urged Papandreou to demand access to the file on Waldheim contained at the UN archives of the War Crimes Commission. The UN recently gave copies of the file to the governments of Austria and Israel. The information in the file has not been disclosed since access was granted under terms of strict confidentiality. During the occupation of Greece, over 500,000 Greek citizens and over 80,000 others were sent to concentration camps.
In 1980, the Hellenic Freedom Foundation, which was organized in 1979 to promote and preserve Hellenism, announced that the UN had in its archives approximately 40,000 Nazi and other Axis war criminals files which had been compiled by the long defunct War Crimes Commission between 1944 and 1947. These files were discovered by Dr. Michael Palumbo, a City University of New York historian while doing research for a book on World War II atrocities by Mussolini in Greece.
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.
