Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and president of Austria whose reputation was tarnished by revelations over his Nazi past, died on June 14 at the age of 88, his family said.
The former statesman suffered a heart attack in May and had been ailing ever since. He left a Vienna hospital last week and died surrounded by his family, they told the APA news agency.
Waldheim was UN chief from 1972 until 1982 and then president of Austria from 1986 to 1992, when he was at the centre of an international storm over his wartime links to a Nazi militia.
His denials of any wrongdoing failed to stop him becoming a virtual outcast on the international diplomatic stage.
As UN secretary general, Waldheim circled the globe preaching his “Christian vision of the world”. He helped organise international conferences and pop concerts for the people of Cambodia.
He won the Austrian presidency in June 1986 but his victory turned sour following reports that he at least knew of Nazi war crimes while a young lieutenant in the Balkans, even if he did not actually participate in any.
His victory prompted Israel to recall its ambassador and boycott his inauguration.
The United States put the Austrian president on its “watch list” of potential undesirables in April 1987 while scores of other countries snubbed him.
A 1987 trip to the Vatican for an audience with Pope John Paul II — his first state visit after his election — unleashed a diplomatic storm.
Waldheim steadfastly denied all allegations about his war-time activities, but critics complained his answers just raised more questions.
Increasingly isolated internationally and at home, he fell back on responses also given by many former Nazis: “I was only doing my duty” and “I have only obeyed orders”.
One week after embarrassing findings of an international historians’ committee were published in February 1988, Waldheim said that to resign would run contrary to his “task of assuring the functioning of Austria’s institutions”.
“A head of state must not give in to slander, hate, demonstrations and mass condemnation,” he said about his decision to stay on.
The controversy erupted in March 1986 when an Austrian newsweekly published a photocopy of his 1939 German army service record revealing that he had been a member of the SA, the Nazi party’s political militia, since 1938, the year Austria was annexed by Germany.
“I did not speak or want to speak much about the war years,” he said. But this “was certainly not a strategy of deceit”.
Waldheim argued that he was forcibly integrated into the Nazi militia as a member of the Consular Academy’s riding club. “Our activities were purely athletic and had nothing to do with the [Nazi] party,” he said.
While Waldheim ran for the presidential elections as a non-party candidate backed by the conservative People’s Party, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the New York Times and other newspapers published a series of war-time documents casting doubts on his account of his activities, including accusations that he was involved in crimes against Yugoslav partisans and in the deportation of Jews from Greece in 1942.
Waldheim, who held a doctorate in law, said he did not remember his whereabouts in the critical 1941 to 1944 period; according to his autobiography he was wounded on the Russian front in December 1941 and “ended his law studies in Vienna in 1944” leaving a blank of over two years.
He later admitted that he served as a low-ranking army officer without real authority in the Balkans and was posted in Yugoslavia and Greece. — AFP