Waldheim affair

Kurt Waldheim (1973)

The Waldheim affair or Waldheim debate (also: affair / Causa / Waldheim case ) was an international debate about the suspected involvement of Kurt Waldheim of war crimes in the period of National Socialism . It began in 1986 in the election campaign of the former UN Secretary General for the Office of the Federal President of Austria , lasted until the end of his term of office in 1992 and continued beyond that.

Waldheim had omitted his activities as an officer in the Wehrmacht from 1942 to 1944 in biographical information and, after it became known, denied any involvement in Nazi crimes and any knowledge of them at the time. Domestic and foreign media and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) disseminated information that was used for conflicting political goals: Waldheim's defenders criticized foreign interference and campaign-like condemnation of an average opportunist , while Waldheim's opponents saw this as a defense against justified accusations. Some historians have analyzed anti-Semitic reaction patterns over the course of the affair.

As president, Waldheim remained largely isolated in terms of foreign policy. In April 1987 the USA issued a private entry ban for the "alleged war criminal". In 1988 an international commission of historians set up by the Austrian government at Waldheim's request found that he had not committed any crimes, but that he had detailed knowledge of murder orders, deportations and murders in his vicinity. He had facilitated their execution a few times, for example by passing on "enemy situation reports".

As a result of the affair, Austria openly discussed the participation of Austrians in Nazi crimes during the Nazi era for the first time . This resulted in a departure from the state victim thesis , according to which Austria was “ Adolf Hitler's first victim ” in 1938 , but it also strengthened the right-wing populist FPÖ . From 1992 the National Council decided to compensate displaced Jews and forced laborers , and from 2001 to restitution .

prehistory

Early notes and inquiries, background

When Waldheim ran for president for the first time (unsuccessfully) in 1971, the FPÖ-affiliated Salzburger Volksblatt claimed that he had belonged to an " SS equestrian standard " and demanded that the ÖVP should therefore not distance itself from its candidate. The report was inconsequential.

The broadcast of the television series Holocaust on the Austrian ORF in March 1979 raised the public question for the first time in which respect the Nazi crimes were also Austrian.

Following a request from Yad Vashem, the Austrian Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal inquired at the Berlin Document Center in 1979, with reference to the Wehrmacht information center , that Waldheim had served as a lieutenant in Army Group E in the Balkans but was not a member of a Nazi organization. He informed Yad Vashem of the latter in writing.

The author Shirley Hazzard reported on January 19, 1980 in the US newspaper The New Republic that Waldheim had been part of the “ Nazi youth movement ” since 1938 . Holocaust survivor Hillel Seidman then asked UN Secretary General Waldheim on October 9, 1980. Waldheim rejected the assumption as "stupid". Waldheim also denied a written request from US Congressman Stephen J. Solarz . Solarz then asked the US foreign intelligence service, the CIA, for information about Waldheim's Nazi membership. A CIA representative denied this on December 31, 1980 and added that there was no evidence of "anti-Jewish activities" by Waldheim.

Candidacy and first research

On March 1, 1985, the SPÖ chairman Fred Sinowatz Waldheim offered to run him as a presidential candidate together with the ÖVP. The following day, however, ÖVP chairman Alois Mock Waldheim nominated as a candidate for his party, which, according to surveys, had a good chance of winning its first presidential election since 1945. On April 16, the SPÖ set up Health Minister Kurt Steyrer as an opposing candidate.

In the spring of 1985 Waldheim published a book about his time as UN Secretary General (1972 to 1981). One chapter in it mentioned his wartime period in a few sentences: he was wounded on the Eastern Front in December 1941 , then given leave to convalesce in Austria, was drafted again after the healing and was near Trieste at the end of the war (May 8, 1945) . He and the ÖVP highlighted his international experience, for example with the poster slogan "An Austrian whom the world trusts".

When Waldheim's campaign team was presented on October 3, 1985, Stern reporter Georg Karp asked whether he was known to have been a member of the National Socialist German Student Union (NSDStB). Only the weekly profil researched it and reported on October 14, 1985 that Karp's statement was unconfirmed.

According to later press reports, leading SPÖ representatives intended in 1985 to make Waldheim's wartime an election campaign topic in order to increase Steyrer's chances of being elected. That was denied by the SPÖ. According to Ottilie Matysek's minutes of the speech , Fred Sinowatz announced to SPÖ representatives from Burgenland on October 28, 1985 that they would “inform the Austrian population about Waldheim's brown past at the right time before the presidential election in a large-scale campaign”. In 1987 Sinowatz sued the profile reporter Alfred Worm , who had quoted his statement in April 1986, for defamation . However, Worm was acquitted based on Matysek's note. Sinowatz and other SPÖ representatives who had denied his testimony were sentenced to heavy fines in 1992 for making false statements.

According to further profil reports, the SPÖ had had a file from the Army Intelligence Office on Waldheim's wartime since spring 1985 . Hans Pusch , the head of Sinowatz's cabinet, is said to have tried to inform the American journalist James M. Dorsey about Waldheim's "brown past" at a meeting in August or September 1985 . He also tried to get information about Waldheim from his former school director, the former SS-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Höttl , which remained unsuccessful. Pusch was therefore considered to be the originator of an international smear campaign against Waldheim for ÖVP election campaign leader Kurt Bergmann as well as for Bruno Kreisky , the former long-time SPÖ Federal Chancellor .

In October 1985, unknown persons gave profile editor-in-chief Helmut Voska a photograph of a young man in the clothes of Nazi students who resembled Waldheim. This denied on presentation that he was pictured; However, Voska now had research carried out on Waldheim's wartime. Even George TIDL , historian and then a journalist with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), researched it and put his findings to the ÖVP campaign manager Alois Mock. This should not have been interested. According to other information, Tidl is said to have tried to blackmail Mock Waldheim's withdrawal from the candidacy and then sold his material to the USA. Tidl contradicted this in 2015: he never spoke to Mock, but to his office manager Clemens Steindl . The story was constructed around Andreas Khol in order to portray him "as a traitor, so to speak". The photo allegedly passed on by him, which showed Waldheim with SS General Artur Phleps , was published as early as 1983.

In January 1986, Wehrmacht general Alexander Löhr , who was executed as a war criminal in 1947, was honored with a memorial plaque in the Viennese collegiate barracks. In a short message about it, profil editor Otmar Lahodynsky mentioned that Waldheim had been an orderly officer on Löhr's staff. The WJC sent Elan Steinberg , one of its lawyers, to Vienna for initial research . There a stranger - Georg Tidl was suspected - is said to have given him material on Waldheim's war past. According to more recent sources, Hans Pusch handed these documents over to Eli Rosenbaum , the chief lawyer of the WJC, on February 4, 1986 .

course

First reports on Waldheim's war past

From March 1986 on, publications on Waldheim's past increased, so that some historians speak of a real “campaign”. On the evening of March 2, Hubertus Czernin's article “Waldheim and the SA” opened a weekly series of articles by profil on Waldheim's war past. This had given Czernin his military master card. Afterwards he was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the NSDStB, after his wounding in 1941 he was classified as "fit for military service", at the end of March 1942 he was transferred to Army High Command 12 (from 1943 Army Group E under General Alexander Löhr ) in Saloniki and in November Received study leave in 1942. Czernin did not speak of any involvement in Nazi crimes.

On March 4, John Tagliabue reported in the New York Times that Waldheim had served in a Wehrmacht unit in 1942 and 1943 that cracked down on partisans and deported masses of Greek Jews to German concentration camps. This and his SA and NSDStB membership would have left out his own biographical information authorized by him. The author named German military files, Austrian military archives and independently checked documents made available by the WJC as sources.

Also on March 4, the WJC in the USA published documents on the same issues for the first time. Among them was a photograph that showed Waldheim with high-ranking SS officers like Artur Phleps , who were involved in the 1942 “Aktion Schwarz” - massacres of thousands of Yugoslav civilians. The WJC emphasized that Waldheim had his SA and NSDStB memberships, his military service in 1942/1943 on the staff of the war criminal Löhr, contacts with Waffen SS representatives and his presence in Saloniki in March 1943 during the daily deportation of 2,000 to 2,500 Jews there always concealed or denied. Edgar Bronfman called this "one of the most elaborate illusions of our time". The WJC confirmed these allegations by July 31, 1986 with a total of 30 press releases.

On March 10, Czernin reported for the first time about Waldheim's position in the " Ic / AO " department in the General Staff of Army Group E. The Ustasha regime in Croatia awarded him the Zvonimir medal with silver and oak leaves for his services in fighting partisans . The United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) mentioned him by name in 1948.

On March 22, the WJC confirmed the latter report with an excerpt from the US Army's Central Register of War Criminals ( CROWCASS ): Then the UNWCC looked for the "Abwehr officer" Waldheim at the request of Yugoslavia in 1948 for murder. The WJC therefore called Waldheim “alleged war criminal” until he was elected, but not a defense officer; so he correctly assessed the document as an unproven suspicion. This was not substantiated because the indictment was based only on oral, unexamined testimony and Waldheim was not on previous search lists. However, the WJC has since assumed that Waldheim had deliberately kept secret parts of his military service and lied about them after they became known. Accordingly, Elan Steinberg emphasized in a profile interview on March 24, 1986: "But Waldheim is not a war criminal - at least as far as we know so far."

Israel Singer (WJC) threatened in the same issue:

“If he does not ruthlessly and completely reveals the past by the time he is elected, this will haunt him and every Austrian for the next few years. Bitburg was bad enough, but only lasted a day; the actions against Waldheim will last six years. "

On March 25, the WJC published research results from its agent Robert Herzstein . This interpreted Waldheim's rank “03” (third orderly officer) in the “Ic / AO” as “senior intelligence officer”. He received the Zvonimir medal after the Kozara massacre, in which his army unit and Ustaša fighters killed thousands of Yugoslavs. He reported directly to the General Staff on prisoner interrogations, the National Socialist reliability of personnel and "special tasks", namely assassinations, kidnappings and deportations, and also signed reports on "purges". Herzstein relied on a service description of Army Group E from December 1943 and a study by the US War Department from 1984 on the Wehrmacht intelligence service . The interpretation of these documents remained controversial in the course of the affair; The WJC representatives did not raise a personal charge of guilt against Waldheim until then.

An ORF editor gave the WJC allegations partly distorted on March 25th: Waldheim was an “Abwehr interrogator” and “verifiably a Nazi”, “lied for 40 years”, “knew about war crimes and personally participated in partisan activities ". On March 26, the mass newspaper New York Post headlined the false claim: Papers show Waldheim was SS Butcher .

On April 14th, the WJC first mentioned documents that Yugoslav prosecutors Waldheims presented to the UNWCC in 1947, describing him as a "fugitive Nazi war criminal". He had identified places with partisan activities, where massacres of civilians were then carried out according to the orders. All but two of the perpetrators involved in "Case 7" of the Nuremberg trials were convicted. The WJC did not mention, however, that one of the acquitted at the time, Hermann Foertsch , as Chief of Staff of Army Groups E and F, was far more responsible for their massacre than Waldheim.

According to further documents, Waldheim should have been involved in retaliatory massacres against three Yugoslav villages in October 1944. The WJC argued as follows: Waldheim had an order from General Löhr to avenge partisan actions with executions and destruction, and thus knew the consequences of his daily reports on "gang activities". Therefore, he is complicit in massacres and setting fire to villages and food. While guilt was not so defined in the Nuremberg Trials, the WJC allegations were consistent with Yugoslav indictments of 1947. The WJC now apparently considered this to be correct: The release of the UN act, Bronfman wrote to the then US Secretary of State George Shultz on April 16 , confirmed the impression that Waldheim had been wanted as a war criminal charged. According to this, he “participated” in the “cruelest behavior” of the National Socialists; in what way, Bronfman left open. On April 29, the WJC submitted documents that, contrary to his alleged ignorance, Waldheim must have known about the deportations of Greek Jews. In addition, he could also have participated personally.

German and British authorities now also researched Waldheim's wartime. On April 28, Der Spiegel reported on "activity reports" from its Ic / AO department from April to July 1944: These included interrogations and handover of Allied prisoners of war to the security service, who were thus subjected to "special treatment" (placement in a concentration camp or murder) . Waldheim had signed some of them. From May 17, the British government, following a request to the House of Commons, had an investigation into whether Waldheim had anything to do with the disappearance of captured British commandos in the Balkan War.

On June 2, an interim report by the WJC listed all documents on Waldheim's "hidden years" that had become known up to that point. Bronfman called Waldheim in this regard an "immoral and unreasonable liar" whose presidential election would be "an act of symbolic amnesty for the Holocaust ". He saw Waldheim as an unscrupulous opportunist who got involved in the “Nazi murder machine”.

Waldheim's reactions

Waldheim confirmed his service in Army Group E to Tagliabue on March 2, 1986, but claimed that he knew nothing about their war crimes and was now hearing for the first time about mass deportations of Greek Jews from Salonika. After 40 years, his opponents wanted to abuse this information politically in a timely manner. He only belonged to Nazi organizations to protect himself and his family. This was known as a Nazi opponent. He never claimed to write a complete autobiography.

In interviews on March 9 and 10, Waldheim rejected all claims about his Nazi past as "untrue". It was a "large-scale smear campaign" planned for months. In this context he said: "I did nothing else in the war than hundreds of thousands of Austrians, namely fulfilled my duty as a soldier". That corresponded to the self-image of many Austrians of his generation.

Waldheim's remark of May 3rd: “[The international press] is dominated by the Jewish World Congress” is rated as an “openly anti-Semitic appeal”. That is well known. "

On March 25, he said the documents presented did not prove any crimes. He was not a defense officer and was therefore not involved in interrogations. On April 13, he denied his participation in the Kozara campaign and its massacres in a 13-page memorandum to US Secretary of State George Shultz and the Washington Post : In the summer of 1942 he was stationed 180 km from Kozara as a liaison officer for Italian infantry. He repeated this to the Spiegel on April 14 and made “a single interest group in New York” responsible for the allegations. For the presidential election in Austria, a "building of lies" was built. But he will not be intimidated:

“I wasn't a Nazi, I wasn't a member of the SA or the NS Student Union, I didn't commit any war crimes. I was a decent soldier who, like hundreds of thousands of others, was forced to serve in the German army. "

After the " Anschluss of Austria ", the National Socialists arrested his father as a supporter of Kurt Schuschnigg . For the sake of form, he had ridden no more than six times in a Nazi equestrian corps without a uniform and noted this in a questionnaire after 1945. There is no SA membership card issued in his name. In order not to bore his readers, he limited biographical information to the turning points that were important to him; In 1971 no one was interested in details from 1942 to 1944. He had never seen a partisan or a Jew with a Jewish star, since as a war wounded he had only “done pure paperwork” as an interpreter, liaison officer and orderly officer. He could not have known anything about the deportation of Jews from Saloniki, since he spent a study vacation in Austria from November 1942 to mid-April 1943. Several witnesses, including his superior at the time, could confirm this. He did not feel responsible for the suffering of the Jewish population under the Nazi regime; his family rejected this regime. 41 years after the end of the war, the Austrians had to "finally put an end to" blanket accusations. The WJC actually attacked him because of his Middle East policy as UN Secretary General.

On October 26, 1986, the national holiday, Waldheim said nothing about Austria's joint responsibility for Nazi crimes. Ari Rath , the editor of the Jerusalem Post , had advised him to do so in the Hofburg on October 3rd, but to no avail.

On October 30, Waldheim's press spokesman Gerold Christian stated that Waldheim had been a translator and "auxiliary officer" in the Kozara campaign in 1942, but not with the fighting troops and not in actions against partisans or Jews. He was responding to evidence that Waldheim was a member of General Friedrich von Stahl's staff at the time . After that, Waldheim's credibility was damaged by proven false statements. Contemporary witnesses and historians refer to his reaction pattern of first ignorance, then forgetting of mass murders as "Waldheim syndrome".

Reactions in Austria

In January 1985, the affair surrounding the greeting of Nazi war criminal Walter Reder by Defense Minister Friedhelm Frischenschlager (FPÖ) led to a broader discussion of the National Socialist past of many Austrians for the first time and raised public awareness of this issue.

On March 3, 1986, the ÖVP organ Neues Volksblatt rejected the information in Czernin's first article on Waldheim as “defamation” on the part of the SPÖ. On March 4, the Wiener Zeitung rejected an alleged accusation by Czernin that Waldheim was involved in activities contrary to martial law. The Austrian state police, CIA and KGB checked him often enough. Representatives of the ÖVP and newspapers close to it had already spoken of defamation in the early election campaign; they and many other Austrian media also fought off later publications about Waldheim's wartime. First they portrayed the SPÖ and later the WJC as the initiator and operator of a planned “ dirt bucket campaign ”. This was often identified with “abroad”, “the east coast press” or “the Jews”. Historians later analyzed such reaction patterns as anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the service of a targeted counter-campaign by the ÖVP. Sinowatz reacted to Waldheim's first denial with the ironic statement: "We take note that he was not with the SA, only his horse was with the SA".

Singer's March 24 threat was rejected in Austria, sometimes no distinction was made between the WJC and “the Jews”. The suspicion was openly expressed that there was a Jewish world conspiracy behind it , whereby the WJC was assumed to have an unrealistically strong influence in accordance with the typical anti-Semitic legends. Other defenders of Waldheim pointed to the alleged origin of the campaign on the "East Coast" , an anti-Semitic code for the alleged power of the Jews in the USA. In the Neue Kronen Zeitung , a commentator compared the WJC with cannibals , which can be understood as an allusion to the anti-Semitic ritual murder allegation. Bruno Kreisky also described the interview as “bad interference” and “tremendous wickedness”. Simon Wiesenthal said that it was not the WJC's revelations about Waldheim's past, but Singer's Bitburg comparison that triggered anti-Semitism among those born after the war. This internal criticism was captured in editorials in the press and the Neue Kronen Zeitung through a victim-perpetrator reversal.

The election campaign became increasingly aggressive. From March 30th, Easter , the ÖVP put up posters in red letters on a bright yellow background: “We Austrians vote who we want!” In the following polls, Waldheim led with 65%. Ultimately, the ÖVP slogan was: “Now all the more!” Erhard Busek , Vice Mayor of Vienna (ÖVP), had the posters removed there after a few days. Historians and political opponents criticized their background color and statement of showing solidarity with Waldheim against “foreign interference” as an anti-Semitic motive. Alleged analogies to the Star of David were rejected by others as defamation.

On April 22, the incumbent Federal President Rudolf Kirchschläger declared in a televised address that as a public prosecutor he would not bring any charges against Waldheim based on the documents presented so far. As an orderly officer , he was not able to order any measures against the civilian population, but must have known of events in his area of ​​responsibility.

Some Austrian Jews criticized the WJC. At the annual conference of the European Jewish Congress in May 1986, Paul Grosz denied him the right to “teach us how to fight anti-Semitism at home.” On May 10, the Jewish Community he led condemned Vienna in one Advertisement in the courier about the use of anti-Semitism in the media and the general verdict that Austria is anti-Semitic.

The Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri criticized in 1987 that the WJC had brought charges before the end of its research and that they were unnecessarily confrontational and aimed at media impact. This obscured the exact meaning of the facts made known during the Nazi era. The Salzburg constitutional law historian Thomas Chaimowicz added that the prosecutors violated biblical prohibitions not to convict people whose guilt was unproven.

In the first ballot on May 4, 1986, Waldheim just missed an absolute majority with 49.6% of the valid votes. He won the runoff election on June 8, 1986 with 53.9% . On the same day, Chancellor Sinowatz and Foreign Minister Leopold Gratz (both SPÖ) resigned. As a result, the SPÖ initially stopped its attacks on Waldheim.

The new SPÖ Chancellor Franz Vranitzky initially continued the coalition with the FPÖ. On September 13, 1986, an FPÖ party congress elected Jörg Haider as the new party chairman in place of Vice Chancellor Norbert Steger, who was classified as social liberal . Haider, who had supported Steyrer's candidacy in 1985, turned around in 1986 and polemicized against attacks on Waldheim from the SPÖ and the USA. Vranitzky then quit the coalition. In the new elections on November 23, 1986, the FPÖ under Haider doubled its vote by almost 10%, also because it won many of the Austrians mobilized by the Waldheim affair. The SPÖ and ÖVP then formed a grand coalition until January 27, 1987, which existed until 1999.

The watchlist decision

On March 25, 1986, the WJC applied to the US Department of Justice to include Waldheim in its watch list for alleged war criminals. The application became known in Austria on April 7th. On April 10, the US Senate called for an investigation into war crimes allegations against Waldheim; the US House of Representatives had gathered evidence during hearings. An intervention by Austria's ambassador Thomas Klestil was unsuccessful. The US State Department postponed the decision until after the federal presidential election. On April 19, the WJC accused Klestil of trying to suppress documents about Waldheim's wartime years and renewed his motion in early August 1986.

On April 9, 1987, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) submitted its final report on Waldheim's wartime past. According to this, in the summer of 1942, during mass murders in the Kozara area in Banja Luka , Waldheim was assigned to Quartermaster Hermann Plume as a supply officer, who also had prisoners deported and executed, and in 1944 he had signed the interrogation protocols of Allied prisoners of war with his name "W". Thereupon US Attorney General Edwin Meese announced on April 27 that Waldheim would be included in the watchlist . This prohibited the US authorities from issuing him an entry visa as a private person. The ban denied Waldheim visits to the USA even after his term in office ended and lasted for life. The administrative act largely acted as a moral condemnation and, according to surveys, met with widespread rejection in Austria.

On April 29, Austria's Foreign Minister Alois Mock described the entry ban as an “unfriendly act” and demanded that the US Ambassador Ronald Lauder in Vienna surrender all documents . The OSI did not publish its report until 1994, but is said to have given the files to the WJC as early as 1987.

During a visit to Vienna on May 15, 1987, a delegation of US lawyers confirmed that there were sufficient prima facie suspicions for the watchlist decision , since Waldheim belonged to a Wehrmacht unit that had carried out persecution and withheld information about it from the public have.

During a visit to the USA on May 21, 1987, Vranitzky tried in vain to get US President Ronald Reagan to reverse the decision. On May 31, his government protested again officially and declared the US decision to be contrary to international law, since Waldheim had been constitutionally elected and therefore could not be subjected to any quasi-judicial administrative act by foreign states.

Foreign policy isolation

After Waldheim's election, Israel recalled its ambassador Michael Elizur from Vienna. Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir claimed that Waldheim had "committed crimes [...]" according to various allegations. Until 1992, the Israeli government operated its embassy in Austria with only one interim chargé d'affaires.

At Waldheim's inauguration on July 8, 1986, the ambassadors of the Soviet Union, the USA and Israel demonstratively stayed away. As Federal President, Waldheim was not invited by any western state and only visited by a few heads of state. Switzerland rejected the traditional inaugural visit of the Austrian head of state. Other countries, including Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany, did not give him any appointments on request.

On June 25, 1987, Pope John Paul II received Waldheim for an audience at his request. Most of the Western ambassadors at the Vatican avoided a meeting; Waldheim remained isolated.

The Israeli Ministry of Justice examined the war crimes allegations and found that they did not justify criminal charges. Nevertheless, Israel officially condemned Waldheim's papal visit on June 18 and 21, 1987. MEPs in the Knesset often referred to Waldheim as a “Nazi” beforehand. Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir said that the Pope legitimized Waldheim's "crimes that he has committed according to various allegations". Foreign Minister Ezer Weizmann , on the other hand, referred to the contributions made by this Pope to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews. Israel's diplomatic relations with Austria were not normalized until after Waldheim's term in office, especially after Thomas Klestil announced to the Knesset on July 8, 1991 that Austria was historically responsible for the Nazi crimes.

The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl , who had campaigned in April 1986 in the ORF for Waldheim's election, met him in August 1987 at the Attersee the first Western head of government for an informal conversation and kept such a holiday contacts until 1992.

Arab and Islamic states, including Iran, Syria and Libya, welcomed Waldheim's election and invited him on state visits. In the USA and Israel in particular, Waldheim's visits or invitations to the Middle East met with strong protests, such as his visits to Jordan in July, Egypt in December 1987, Syria, Turkey and Kuwait in October 1988 and Iraq in 1990. Turkey should the USA threatened to cancel relief supplies because of their invitation to Waldheim.

Some Eastern European countries invited Waldheim on state visits, according to the Hungarian Foreign Minister on a visit to Vienna in 1987. The Soviet Union had defended Waldheim in the election campaign, but did not invite him. Your news agency Tass criticized the watchlist decision as an "unfriendly act" by " Zionist circles ". The affair thus became involved in the East-West conflict at the time and an objective examination of the allegations was made even more difficult.

Various attacks and assaults

In February 1987, the Jerusalem Post printed an alleged letter from Alois Mock, in which he informed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that Waldheim would be advised to resign for health reasons, as his remaining in office would be harmful to Austria. In April the editors admitted that they had been caught by a fake and regretted it.

On May 5, 1987, Edgar Bronfman described Waldheim as "an essential part of the Nazi killing machine". Because of his blatant "misdeeds and lies", it is "almost a crime against humanity " to have too much to do with him. Waldheim then reported him to Austria on May 7th for defamation . However, he had the criminal proceedings initiated against Bronfman set on July 2, 1988. At a demonstration on St. Peter's Square against Waldheim's Pope's visit to Rome, the New York Rabbi Avi Weiss shouted that there was blood on Waldheim's hands.

On June 27, 1987 the Viennese SPÖ decided on the initiative of the former resistance fighter Josef Hindels to demand Waldheim's resignation. In the previous debate, Hindels described Waldheim as a “devious liar” with reference to his biographical omissions. ÖVP general secretary Michael Graff Hindels then compared with the Nazi judge Roland Freisler .

The Vice Mayor of Linz, Carl Hödl, wrote a letter to Edgar Bronfman in July 1987. In it he compared his statements about Waldheim with statements "of your fellow believers 2000 years ago, who had Jesus Christ sentenced to death in a show trial because he did not fit into the concept of the Lords of Jerusalem". In doing so, he took up the anti-Semitic topos of the murder of God . The federal ÖVP and the entire Linz municipal council distanced themselves from this comparison.

Graff had described WJC representatives in the 1986 election campaign as "dishonorable fellows". In 1987 he accused them of "putting the justified outrage about the Holocaust [...] at the service of their own publicity" and thus triggering anti-Semitic reflexes that were still there. He stressed, however, that he and the ÖVP had always intended “concrete resistance against specific slander”. On June 19, 1987, he turned against the generalized headline “Jews attack the Pope because of Waldheim's invitation” in the ÖVP newspaper Neues Volksblatt . In a subsequent correspondence with Paul Grosz, he condemned “hostility and hatred” towards Austrian Jews and asked the religious community to intercede with “their fellow believers all over the world” for a moderation of the attacks on Waldheim. He then told the French newspaper L'Express : "As long as it has not been proven that he [Waldheim] strangled six Jews himself, there is no problem." After severe criticism of the sentence, he resigned as General Secretary on November 18, 1987 .

During the affair, Austrian Jews experienced increased physical attacks, threats and insults, so that some left the country. Participants in a vigil “against forgetting” in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna , which took place every day from June 8 to July 8, 1987 and was supported by many prominent artists and intellectuals, were also exposed to attacks. However, publications of the time (including Jewish ones) assessed differently whether anti-Semitic attitudes had increased in the general population.

Relief attempts

Shortly after his election, Waldheim agreed to a suggestion made by Simon Wiesenthal in June 1986 to have his past checked by military historians. However, on April 12, 1987, his press spokesman refused to "set up a tribunal over an elected Federal President."

On May 5, the Austrian government commissioned international law expert Felix Ermacora , state archives manager Kurt Peball and military historian Manfried Rauchsteiner to sift through material in Belgrade on Waldheim's activities in the Balkans since 1942. The commissioners searched the military archives there from May 12 to 14 with the result that a “thorough study of the documents” did not reveal any culpable involvement of Waldheim in war crimes. This was widely viewed as an unbelievable attempt at exoneration.

At Waldheim's request, on May 14, the government set up an international and paid commission of historians to examine the allegations without a deadline.

On June 11, Foreign Minister Alois Mock nominated Waldheim's predecessor Karl Gruber , Ambassador Hans Reichmann and the publisher Fritz Molden as special ambassadors. These tried largely unsuccessfully to improve Austria's image abroad, which had been damaged by Waldheim's election. Reichmann declared that Waldheim had become a "victim" of Kreisky's Middle East policy, his UN policy and the US presidential election campaign.

For his part, Waldheim commissioned his closest confidants, including his son and Karl Gruber, to collect exonerating documents. On November 27, 1987, they published a “white paper” which essentially listed finds and statements by Waldheim that were already known and with which the Foreign Ministry had defended Waldheim abroad for months.

Counterfeit

On January 22, 1988, the Yugoslav military historian Dušan Plenča, a former anti-Nazi partisan, claimed that he had found a telegram proving Waldheim's involvement in the German-Croatian partisan and Jewish persecution in the Kozara region. He left a copy of it to Spiegel , which published it on February 1. Then a Croatian colonel reported to his superior on July 22, 1942 that "Lieutenant Waldheim" had requested the immediate deportation of 4,224 prisoners, mainly women and children, from Kozara to two transit camps.

The publication sparked a heated argument in Yugoslavia. The original document could not be found. On February 11, Plenča stated that he had only received one copy from war comrades. It was suspected that the Yugoslav government had made the original disappear from war archives or that former partisans had launched a forgery in order to torpedo an expected exoneration of Waldheim with the upcoming historian's report.

The German font expert Bernhard Haas and a Yugoslav commission independently came to the conclusion by February 15 that the copied document had been typed on a Czech typewriter at the earliest in 1949 and was therefore most likely forged. On October 17, 1988, Der Spiegel regretted that it had printed the document and called Waldheim an “accomplice in war crimes”.

New documents found

On February 5, 1988, Robert Herzstein announced a report that Waldheim had written and signed for his superiors on May 25, 1944 in Arsakli. Thereafter, the retaliatory measures for sabotage and ambushes, despite their severity, would have had little success. Since they were only temporary, the punished villages and regions soon fell back to the "gangs" (partisans). Without scrutinizing the objective situation, they only caused bitterness that would benefit the gangs.

Herzstein saw Waldheim's knowledge of the massacres of his army group at the time and his role as a helper as proven. Here, presumably because of the foreseeable defeat of the Wehrmacht, he had distanced himself unusually openly for practical, but not moral reasons.

At the same time, Herzstein confirmed earlier media reports that the 1947 Yugoslav indictment against Waldheim, on which the WJC had relied, had been falsified in order to discredit him as Austria's delegate in Allied border negotiations. The Yugoslavs knew nothing of Waldheim's participation in the Kozara campaign and dropped their charges against him in 1948 after Tito's break with the Soviet Union. However, his name went unnoticed on the UNWCC list. Herzstein stated this in his book Waldheim: The Missing Years , published shortly thereafter .

Historian report

The commission of historians set up by the Austrian government consisted of Jean Vanwelkenhuyzen (Belgium), Manfred Messerschmidt (Federal Republic of Germany), Gerald Fleming (Great Britain), Jehuda Wallach (Israel), Hagen Fleischer (Greece), Hans-Rudolf Kurz (Switzerland) and James Lawton Collins junior (USA). It met for the first time on September 1, 1987, on February 8, 1988 the report of the International Commission of Historians was handed over to Chancellor Vranitzky and subsequently made public. Contrary to the original plans, there was no publication. It was not published in print until a few years later in an English translation.

The International Commission of Historians found no evidence that Waldheim personally committed war crimes, but evidence that he had known about them in his various functions. She found no evidence of protests or attempts to prevent them, but she did find indications that his reports of hostile activities had facilitated the execution of some massacres. This also proved that Waldheim's biographical information was partly incorrect, partly incomplete and that his statements about it in the course of the affair were untrue. The commission report summarized his possible "complicity in martial law":

“Even if he had no powers of execution as a subaltern officer in staff positions, thanks to his education and knowledge as well as the insights he received as an interpreter into the decisive leadership processes, he was particularly welcome from his work in the central intelligence service of his army group and his local proximity the events, excellently oriented about the war. [...] Even if his personal influence on the decision-making process of the top management (in the southeast) was on the one hand somewhat overestimated by his opponents and on the other too much belittled by his defenders, Waldheim was often present at these meetings, participated in them and was consequently one of the particularly well-oriented staff members. His general insights were extensive: they not only related to the tactical, strategic and administrative arrangements, but in some cases also included the actions and measures that were contrary to martial law and the principles of humanity.
The Commission has not received any knowledge of any case in which Waldheim has objected, protested or taken any countermeasures to the order of an injustice which he undoubtedly recognized, in order to prevent or at least make it more difficult to carry out the injustice. On the contrary, he has repeatedly participated in unlawful transactions and thus facilitated their enforcement. [...] Waldheim's account of his military past is in many respects inconsistent with the results of the commission's work. He tried hard to let his military past fall into oblivion and, as soon as that was no longer possible, to play it down. In the opinion of the Commission, this forgetting is so fundamental that it was unable to obtain any clarifying information for its work from Waldheim. "

Section six deals with ways of not following or bypassing illegal orders:

“Waldheim is to be credited with the fact that only extremely modest possibilities were open to him for resistance against injustice. [...] For a young staff member who had no authority of his own at army group level, the practical possibilities of counteraction were very limited and in all probability would hardly have led to a tangible result. They should have limited themselves to a formal protest or to the practical rejection of his cooperation, which would have seemed a courageous act, but would hardly have led to practical success. No such action by Waldheim has come to light. "

Reactions to the historian's report

According to internal statements, Waldheim initially refused to accept the report, asked the government to reject it and otherwise threatened to dismiss it. Outwardly, he described the report as a “comprehensive discharge” even before it was published, confirming that he was not involved in war crimes. Historians of the commission contradicted this: His co-knowledge is very clearly documented. Jehuda Wallach emphasized that the report nowhere expressly excludes any personally culpable behavior on the part of Waldheim and that the material would be sufficient for a judicial investigation.

Simon Wiesenthal saw the report on February 8, 1988 as an opportunity for Waldheim to resign without losing face. The journalist Otto Schulmeister contradicted this : Resignation would permanently split Austria's democracy. On February 13, Karl Gruber publicly referred to the committee members as "opponents" of Waldheim; among them is a "socialist" and the rest are of "Jewish descent". Vranitzky then apologized to the historians. Gruber maintained his account despite severe criticism.

In a televised address on February 15, 1988, Waldheim contradicted his previous assessment by stating that the report was "partly incorrect". He sees no reason to resign and has a "clear conscience". One must ensure that the “minority” who “continue to drive this polemic” “gives some peace.” The entire SPÖ then demanded his resignation on February 22nd, since he obviously did not achieve the goals he had set himself as president could meet. At the same time, the SPÖ offered the ÖVP to propose a joint new presidential candidate. However, the ÖVP board rejected this. Even Herbert Krejci (ÖVP), representatives of the Federation of Austrian Industry , called for the resignation; a Salzburg mayor of the ÖVP resigned because of Waldheim's adherence to the office. Economists such as Hans Seidel warned that Austria's reputation, which had been damaged by Waldheim, made it difficult to recruit foreign scientists and jeopardized EU membership.

The Austrian historian Joseph H. Kaiser criticized in March 1988 that the commission had exceeded its mandate: it was originally supposed to check the existence of personally culpable behavior, but then checked for knowledge and did not distinguish it from complicity. However, he disregarded the fact that the commission had found Waldheim's "consultative support" for some war crimes of which he was aware.

On March 7, 1988, Waldheim publicly admitted for the first time that he had known of the interrogation of Allied prisoners of war in his army group and their subsequent execution under Hitler's criminal command of November 18, 1942. The historian's report, however, exonerated him from suspicion of having been personally involved in the death of missing prisoners. One could not construct guilt from what he knew at the time.

Television tribunal

Since July 1987, two British and one American TV stations have been producing a television tribunal on Waldheim's war past without an official mandate and with a great deal of research. 25 historians searched 19 archives and interviewed 36 survivors of German massacres and deportations in the Balkan campaign as well as Waldheim's former comrades from Division Ic / AO in his Army Group E about the allegations against him. Waldheim declined the invitation to participate and said: "And if you search for a hundred years, you will not find anything."

In April 1988 a commission of five lawyers, one each from the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany, questioned the witnesses who had traveled to London for nine days. Telford Taylor , a lawyer involved in the Nuremberg Trials, advised the commission; Allan Ryan, who had prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the USA, took on the role of prosecutor, and that of defense attorney Peter Rawlinson, a conservative British attorney general. The previously highly controversial commission came to the conclusion in a final consultation lasting three and a half hours that there was not enough evidence that Waldheim had to justify itself for violations of international martial law committed between 1942 and 1944. A summary of the Waldheim television tribunal: A Commission of Inquiry was broadcast in June 1988. German and Austrian broadcasters rejected the purchase of the production, but reported in detail on the result and interpreted it as a final "acquittal".

Follow-up Remembrance Day

Before the state act on March 12, 1988, the 50th anniversary of Austria's "annexation" to the German Reich of the Nazi era , Austrian politicians argued whether, where and how Waldheim should speak. The planned federal assembly was canceled after many parliamentarians said they would be absent from their speech because of Waldheim's planned speech. Erhard Busek (ÖVP) demanded that the internationally recognized state act be canceled entirely due to the burden of the affair.

Waldheim was not allowed to speak at the state act, but on television the evening before. He first described the grief of his family over the “downfall of the Austrian homeland” on March 12, 1938, then the enthusiastic approval of hundreds of thousands of Austrians for Hitler, and concluded “that we must defend ourselves from the first beginnings of hate speech and intolerance” he:

“The Holocaust is one of the greatest tragedies in world history. Millions of Jewish people were exterminated in the concentration camps. Nothing can explain or excuse these crimes. I bow with deep respect for these victims, who must always be a reminder and a mandate for us. […] Of course there is no collective guilt , but as head of state of the Republic of Austria I would like to apologize for the crimes that were committed by Austrians under the sign of National Socialism . "

However, Austria as a state was undeniably “Hitler's first victim”, for years “ resisted the political and economic pressure of the Third Reich ” and received no foreign aid.

International press reports welcomed Waldheim's apology, but highlighted his silence on his own controversial wartime past and his opposition to calls for resignation.

Further research and testimonials

On April 7, 1944, six British commandos landed on the island of Alimia , captured by Germans, transferred Waldheim's unit and then disappeared without a trace. Under pressure from the British Parliament, Margaret Thatcher had a 1986 investigation into Waldheim's possible involvement in the incident reopened in February 1988 with more staff. A former UN employee of Waldheim also took part after he learned that Waldheim had signed precise reports of interrogations of Allied prisoners and their handover to the SD .

On March 4, 1988, a former leader of an Allied command testified the secret execution of an Australian prisoner of war in Saloniki in 1944 when Waldheim was stationed there. In September 1988, Christopher Montague Woodhouse , British coordinator of Greek resistance groups from 1943 to 1945, wrote in the magazine Encounter : Waldheim was partly to blame for the 1944 murder of the Australian resistance activist Bunny Warren by mentioning his name and an "act of sabotage" in an interrogation report and so on caused his extradition to the SD for "special treatment". Woodhouse therefore rejected the results of the television tribunal and later also of the British Commission of Inquiry. This finally reported in 1989 that Waldheim had no personal involvement in the capture, interrogation and murder of British prisoners of war to be proven.

In contradiction to this, the OSI affirmed in its file, which was expanded in 1987 and published in 1994, that Waldheim had involved the transfer of civilians to the SS for forced labor, the deportation of civilians to concentration and extermination camps , of Jews from Banja Luka and the Greek islands, and anti-Semitic propaganda , Mistreatment and execution of Allied prisoners as well as hostage murders of his army unit (assisted) . The report dealt extensively with Waldheim's memoranda, the white paper of his supporters and his public statements since 1986 and described numerous "errors" and "misleadings" in them. The four authors stressed that they would not hesitate to rely on the evidence found in a criminal case.

In 1998, Hans Wende, a subordinate of Waldheim in Department 03 of the Ic / AO from October 1943 to September 1944 and an important witness of the television tribunal, provided the historian Hermann Frank Meyer with 15 "enemy situation reports", which Wende prepared in close cooperation with the Secret Field Police and Waldheim had signed. Wende affirmed in interviews with Meyer: Although Waldheim had and exercised no authority, like all other members of the department, he undoubtedly knew exactly about the ordered "atonement measures":

“Everyone in Arsakli knew the orders. Waldheim too, of course. If Waldheim denies that, then he's not telling the truth. "

consequences

politics

Political scientist Melanie A. Sully interprets the Waldheim affair as an intensified breaking up of social contradictions in Austria after Bruno Kreisky's chancellorship was more geared towards domestic political consensus. Cartels of business associations and parties had controlled the political system in Austria, so that it had shown itself to be incapable of resolving the conflict and discouraged criticism.

The affair, in turn, had significant political implications. While Chancellor Vranitzky tried to improve Austria's image abroad and thus took on the role of head of state, which Waldheim was denied due to his isolation, the SPÖ had been divided since the Viennese party district demanded resignation. The ÖVP was torn between its solidarity with Waldheim and its traditionally US-friendly attitude. The SPÖ and ÖVP did not overcome their differences in dealing with the affair, either. Compared to their grand coalition, the nationalist and nationally liberal “ Third Camp ” established itself as a permanent force that both mainstream parties had to take into account when forming governments.

After the affair subsided in 1988, Waldheim continued to polarize the country, so that he could not become a bipartisan authority or set any domestic political accents. His opponents did not relieve him of the self-criticism and insight he expressed later. This was also expressed in the ironically deferential abbreviation UHBP ("Our Mr. Federal President"). His loss of influence meant that the office of the Federal President as such was called into question. According to a Gallup poll from 1991, 30% of the Austrians questioned blamed Waldheim for the affair, 29% the US media, 23% the SPÖ, 19% "the Jews" and 18% the Austrian newspapers.

In terms of foreign policy, Austria applied for membership in the European Union in 1989 , which also appeared to be endangered in the ÖVP by Waldheim's adherence to office. Austria's international image as an “island of the blessed” could no longer be continued: Europeans who closely followed the affair, for example, according to Tony Judt, now viewed Austria as an “ugly, small, amnesiac alpine fortress, full of incorrigible xenophobic neo-Nazis ”. In contrast, the years of reporting on Waldheim hardly changed the US citizens' image of Austria, as a representative survey in 1992 showed.

Relationship between Austria and the Nazi era

The Waldheim affair marked a turning point in Austria's relationship to the Nazi era: the “ victim myth ”, which was anchored in the 1945 declaration of independence and in the 1955 State Treaty as a founding consensus with reference to the Allies , could no longer be continued. He had largely obscured the complicity of many Austrians in Nazi crimes and Austria's shared responsibility for their consequences. It is true that inadequate denazification was discussed in domestic politics before: for example, since 1960 with university professor Taras Borodajkewycz , since 1970 with former NSDAP members in the SPÖ (see Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal affair ) or in 1980 when the right-wing extremist NDP cut off in elections at that time. However, this has hardly received any international attention. The affair surrounding the greeting of Nazi war criminal Walter Reder by Defense Minister Frischenschlager (FPÖ), which also triggered international criticism, belongs in this context. This deeper problem culminated from 1986 in the Waldheim affair, which “distorted” the actions of a subordinate war participant brought it to the center of attention.

The liberal journalist Hans Rauscher described the discussion as “a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man who, in the most unfortunate way, but not without his own fault, has become a 'symbol'”. According to the historian Michael Gehler , Waldheim represents a "generation of adaptive followers " who pushed their Nazi era after 1945 and carried out the reconstruction . According to Anton Pelinka, this typical opportunism enabled many to identify positively. In Gehler's view, the SPÖ and especially Sinowatz had scandalized and abused Waldheim's Nazi past “to provide political advantages”.

Dietrich Seybold emphasized that the "average Austrian" of the war generation had on the one hand averted responsibility for Nazi crimes and maintained his ignorance of them for as long as possible, on the other hand emphasized that he had only "fulfilled his duty" in the Nazi state. Since the Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann had justified himself with these words in the Eichmann trial in 1961 , the contradiction to the victim thesis became obvious:

"For how could [...] the forced participation in the war on the side of an occupying power be understood as a 'fulfillment of duty'?"

This led to a strongly polarized domestic political struggle over the Austrian view of history, which triggered more intensive research into the Nazi era in Austria and gradually changed the self-image of the state and its citizens.

Soon after the presidential election, the Austrian government tried to improve relations with emigrants by setting up Jewish museums and monuments such as those for Sigmund Freud . Kurt Waldheim visited the Mauthausen concentration camp , and in 1988 Soviet Jews were to be naturalized. Austria's positive contributions to culture and human rights were given more prominence.

The Judeo-Christian dialogue was intensified. After a meeting of representatives of Jews and Catholics from Austria, Cardinal Franz König declared in 1986 that the Catholic Church shared responsibility for National Socialism. With the official acknowledgment of the complicity of many Austrians by the Federal President and Chancellor, a process of compensation for surviving Nazi victims and their relatives began. The legend of the “ clean Wehrmacht ”, which prevails in Austria as in Germany and which many Waldheim supporters publicly represented, has since been questioned more strongly.

Michael Gehler, on the other hand, sees rather problematic consequences of the Waldheim affair for the Austrian way of dealing with the Nazi past. Unlike the German President Richard von Weizsäcker , who had an integrating effect with his speech on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war , Waldheim polarized the public in his country. The popular educational effect of the debate, which was initially noticeable, got stuck in the beginning, and the undifferentiated attacks on Waldheim hardened the position of those who clung to the victim myth. In this context, he quotes Simon Wiesenthal , who complained that the affair "ruined years of educational work".

art

The Waldheim affair inspired some artists to produce works and statements and influenced the way in which critical art was dealt with in Austria.

In the spring of 1986, the sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka created a four-meter-high wooden horse with a hollow belly in the style of the Trojan horse , which wore an SA cap and a swastika and was inscribed by the writer Peter Turrini . As a “memorial against amnesia”, it was intended to commemorate Waldheim's denied membership of the Reiter-SA and symbolize a widespread Austrian suppression of the Nazi era. This work of art was put up by demonstrators of the group “ Republican Club - New Austria ” for the inauguration of Waldheim on Stephansplatz in Vienna , after his visit to the Vatican in July 1987 on Piazza Navona in Rome and at other places where Waldheim visited. The " Memorial Against War and Fascism " designed by Hrdlicka in 1988 was not erected on Albertinaplatz in Vienna until 1991 after violent protests .

The Austrian literature have been working since the affair reinforced with the Nazi period, especially from the perspective of the victims, apart. Many poets published protests against Waldheim that were hardly noticed in Austria. Josef Haslinger's essay on the politics of feelings (1986) is considered to be the "hour of birth of a new self-critical ... Austrian essay writing", which no longer dealt with Waldheim's forgetting, but dealt with the collective memory of the Nazi era and thus received attention far beyond the national borders. In 1986, in her acceptance speech for the Heinrich Böll Prize , Elfriede Jelinek criticized the way Austrians dealt with the Nazi era. In 1987 she composed the satirical drama President Abendwind to support demands for Waldheim's resignation.

The Swedish cabaret sketch The award , which awarded a Waldheim actor with the “Amnesia International” award, received the Golden Rose of Montreux in May 1987 . The ORF did not broadcast the sketch in its report on the award. The cabaret artist Ottfried Fischer imitated the Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss during a phone call with Waldheim and invited him to the Oktoberfest in Munich in 1987.

George Tabori's culturally critical staging of Franz Schmidt's oratorio “ The Book with Seven Seals ” canceled the Salzburg Festival in 1987 after political pressure. Critics spoke of censorship . At the opening of the festival, Waldheim spoke of the “destructive masochism ” from which Austrian culture should turn away. In view of the many graves and memorial days for victims - which, he left open - the “Austrian national character” could not be characterized by reckless rejection and easy forgetting.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Anschluss” of Austria, Thomas Bernhard wrote the drama “ Heldenplatz ”, which Claus Peymann performed on October 4, 1988 in the Vienna Burgtheater . The plot thematizes the repressed but lively Nazi past of many Austrians using the example of a family of Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to Vienna and who are persecuted there again 50 years later. Media such as the Kronen Zeitung tried to prevent the premiere with a campaign . Without knowing it, Waldheim described the play as a “gross insult to the Austrian people” and thus became the first Federal President of Austria to get involved in a theater scandal. Peymann and Bernhard received many death threats and verbal abuse; there was an arson attack on the Burgtheater on the day of the performance. Peymann explained that the piece uncovered “the very deep anti-Semitism that is now manifesting itself publicly”.

Various pop and rock performers made references to the affair. Terence Trent D'Arby (USA) canceled a sold-out concert in Vienna on November 10, 1987 because he did not want to use the tax deductions from the proceeds to support the government of a country that Waldheim had chosen. In the first verse of his song The Sound of Musik, Falco (Austria) alluded to Waldheim's incomplete and justified biography. The group Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung (Austria) addressed the affair and Waldheim's refusal to resign in their songs Kurti (1988 on the single Burli ) and When one must go . Waldheim considered a lawsuit for "libel" against it. Lou Reed (USA) criticized the Pope for the audience he had given Waldheim in his 1989 song Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim . In the film Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), the ship's crew is said to have been slogan: “We are the Waldheim SS from Austria! "

In 1995, the publisher Herbert Fleissner, who was friends with Waldheim, had a page removed from the edition of a book by Bill Bryson that had been translated into German because he had called Waldheim a "pathological liar" there.

Waldheim's self-criticism

In August 1991, Waldheim decided against a further candidacy, also from the ÖVP. After that, he gradually admitted mistakes in dealing with the allegations, but not moral failure during the Nazi era. On March 5, 2006, he mainly regretted his sentence about the performance of duty and said:

“It was necessary, yes, indispensable, for us Austrians to say goodbye to the role of victim. It was the basis of our inner peace after 1945, the reconstruction and our post-war identity, but only part of reality. "

Shortly before his death in 2007, he asked his critics in a “last word” for “a late reconciliation”: he was not a follower or accomplice of the Nazi regime. As a mistake he named "the too late coming to terms" with his war past and regretted:

"... that - under the external pressure of monstrous accusations that had nothing to do with my life and my thinking - I took a comprehensive and unequivocal position on the Nazi crimes far too late."

As reasons for this, he named Austria's state policy as "Hitler's first victim" and his personal "sadness, humiliation, even the horror of the content and extent of these allegations." This inferential he called for a common understanding of history, compromise and consensus.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn then portrayed him in his funeral sermon on July 23, 2007 as a “seeker of peace” who “has set his life entirely on reconciliation”. Federal President Heinz Fischer said in his funeral speech: “... that an injustice was done to the person and to Federal President Kurt Waldheim when he was accused of actions, including war crimes, which he did not commit. […] Kurt Waldheim became a projection screen for guilty conscience in connection with our handling of the Nazi era and with failures in post-war history. ”Others criticized that by sticking to the office he put his personal interests above those of Austria and never repented or expressed regret for his involvement in Wehrmacht units that had committed war crimes. Hundreds of thousands of “ordinary, well-meaning, but ambitious people like Waldheim” would have made the Third Reich and its mass crimes possible.

literature

swell

• Profil , Volume 19, Issues 1–17. Wirtschafts-Trend magazine publisher, 1988.
• Manfred Messerschmidt , International Commission Of Historians (Ed.): Waldheim Report Submitted: First Authorized Edition. Museum Tusculanum Press, unchanged new edition 1993, ISBN 87-7289-206-4 (English; book excerpt online )

overview

• Eberhard Jäckel , Peter Longerich , Julius H. Schoeps : Encyclopedia of the Holocaust , Volume III , Argon, article Waldheim Affair , p. 1513.
• Richard Mitten (with a short addition by Michael Berenbaum ): Art. Waldheim Affair , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 2. A., Vol. 20, 602–604.

Publications made during and from the affair

• Bernard Cohen, Luc Rosenzweig: Le Mystère Waldheim. Gallimard, Paris 1986 (French).
  • German: The Waldheim complex. Publishing house for social criticism , Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-900351-75-9 .
• Group "New Austria" (Ed.): Duty fulfillment. A report about Kurt Waldheim. (Foreword: Peter Handke) Löcker Verlag, Vienna 1986.
• Hanspeter Born : For the correctness: Kurt Waldheim. Schneekluth, 1987, ISBN 3-7951-1055-6 .
• Anton Pelinka (Ed.): The great taboo: Austria's handling of its past. Verlag Österreich (1987), 2nd edition 1997, ISBN 3-7046-1094-1 .
• Karl Gruber: Kurt Waldheim's war years. A documentation. Gerold, Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-900812-00-4 .
• Jack Saltman: Kurt Waldheim: a case to answer? University of Michigan, Robson Books, 1988, ISBN 0-86051-516-8 .
• Robert Edwin Herzstein: Waldheim: the missing years. Arbor House, 1988, ISBN 0-87795-959-5 .
• Joseph H. Kaiser : In the dispute over a head of state: On the case of Federal President Waldheim. Serious transgressions of boundaries and mistakes by the historians' commission. Duncker & Humblot, 1988, ISBN 3-428-06439-9 .
• Hans Köchler (Ed.): The International Campaign Against Austrian President Kurt Waldheim: Documents of the International Solidarity Committee. International Progress Organization, 1988, ISBN 3-900704-04-X .
• Simon Wiesenthal : The Waldheim case. In: Simon Wiesenthal: Right, not revenge. Memories. Ullstein Verlag, 1990, ISBN 3-550-07829-3 , p. 380 ff. (17th chapter).
• Karl Gruber, Robert Krapfenbauer, Walter Lammel: We about Waldheim. A man, an era in the judgment of fellow citizens. Böhlau, Vienna 1992.
• Kurt Waldheim: The answer. Amalthea Signum, 1996, ISBN 3-85002-371-0 .
• Georg Tidl : Kurt Waldheim - As it really was. The story of a research . 1st edition. Löcker Verlag, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-85409-781-5 .

Overall representations of contemporary history

• Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A case study on dealing with the Nazi past in the late eighties. In: Rolf Steininger, Michael Gehler (Hrsg.): Austria in the 20th century. Volume 2: From World War II to the Present. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-205-98527-3 , pp. 355-414.
• Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man"? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992. In: Michael Gehler, Hubert Sickinger: Political affairs and scandals in Austria. From Mayerling to Waldheim. Studienverlag, 1st edition, unaltered reprint 2007 (first edition Kulturverlag 1996), ISBN 3-7065-4331-1 ( text online ; PDF; 479 kB).
• Robert Kriechbaumer : A turning point. The SPÖ - FPÖ coalition 1983-1987 in historical analysis . From the point of view of political actors and in cartoons by Ironimus . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77770-0 , 1986 - An election of the Federal President, not like any other, p. 481-530 .
• Barbara Tóth , Hubertus Czernin (Ed.): 1986. The year that changed Austria. Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7076-0088-2 ( Scientific review by H-Soz-u-Kult ).
• Alexander Pollak: The Waldheim Affair - The Nazi Balkan Campaign. In: Alexander Pollak: The Wehrmacht legend in Austria. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-77021-8 .
• Anton Pelinka: Kurt Waldheim. In: Herbert Dachs, Peter Gerlich , Wolfgang C. Müller (Ed.): The politicians. Careers and work of important representatives of the Second Republic. Vienna 1995, pp. 586-593.
• Andreas Khol, Theo Faulhaber, Günther Ofner: The campaign. Kurt Waldheim, victim or perpetrator? Background and scenes of a case of media justice. Herbig Verlag, 2nd edition 1995, ISBN 3-7766-1470-6 .
• Melanie A. Sully: A contemporary history of Austria . Routledge, London / New York 1990, ISBN 0-415-01928-1 .

On effects in Austria

anti-Semitism

• Christian Fleck, Albert Müller: On Post-Nazi Anti-Semitism in Austria. Austrian Journal of History, Volume 3, 1992, Issue 4 ( PDF text online ).
• Richard Mitten, Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia: Do you speak anti-Semitic? Anti-Semitism in Public Discourse. In: Sprachreport 3/1989, pp. 7–15.
• Ruth Wodak: The Waldheim Affair and Antisemitic Prejudice in Austrian Public Discourse. Patterns of Prejudice Volume 24, nos. 2-4, 1990, pp. 18-33 (English).
• Ruth Wodak and others: “We are all innocent perpetrators.” Discourse-historical studies on post-war anti-Semitism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-28481-9 .
• Helmut Gruber: Anti-Semitism in the media discourse. The "Waldheim" affair in the daily press. Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1991, ISBN 3-8244-4062-8 .
• Klaus Holz : Waldheim Affair. In: Klaus Holz: National anti-Semitism: Sociology of knowledge of a world view. Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-930908-67-0 , pp. 493-535.

Others

• Johanna Gehmacher : "A collective educational novel" - Austrian identity politics and the lessons of history, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaften 4 (2007), 128–156.
• Richard Bassett: Waldheim and Austria. Penguin Books, 1990, ISBN 0-14-013019-5 .
• Richard Mitten: The Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice. The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria. Westview Press Incorporated, Boulder, San Francisco / Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-8133-7630-0 .
• Ruth Wodak: Waldheim hunters and innocent perpetrators. In: Germanistische Linguistik, Olms Verlag, 1992, pp. 112–113.
• Gerhard Botz (ed.): Controversies about Austria's contemporary history: suppressed past, Austrian identity, Waldheim and the historians. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-593-34027-5 .
• Bernhard Heindl: "We Austrians are a decent people". Kurt Waldheim. Argument-Verlag GmbH, 1997, ISBN 3-901100-03-2 .
• Berthold Unfried: Visions of the memory of nationalism and war in Austria and their change in the Waldheim debate. Zeitgeschichte 24 (1997) 9/10, ISSN  0256-5250 , pp. 302-316.
• Ernst Hofbauer: The Waldheim plot. A political moral story. Ibera, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-900436-60-6 .
• Heidemarie Uhl : Between Reconciliation and Disturbance. A controversy about Austria's identity 50 years after the “Anschluss”. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-205-05419-9 .
• Ruth Wodak: From Waldheim to Haider - An Introduction. In: Ruth Wodak, Anton Pelinka: The Haider Phenomenon in Austria. Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University, New Jersey 2001 (English)
• Helga Embacher : Literature of feelings: The reflection of the Waldheim affair in Austrian literature. In: Moshe Zuckermann (Hrsg.): German history of the 20th century in the mirror of German-language literature. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 978-3-89244-685-9 , pp. 148-165.
• Dietrich Seybold: The “Historikerstreit” (1986–87) and the “Waldheim Affair” (1986–88) as reference points in a history of debate. In: Dietrich Seybold: History culture and conflict: Historical-political controversies in contemporary societies. Peter Lang Verlag, Bern 2005, ISBN 3-03910-622-8 , pp. 47–58.
• Siegfried Göllner: The political discourses on “denazification”, “Causa Waldheim” and “EU sanctions”. Victim narratives and images of history in national council debates. Studies on Contemporary History, Volume 72, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8300-4525-0 .

International effects

• Harold H. Tittmann: The demonization - A documentation of the US character assassination campaign against Waldheim. Molden Verlag, Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-85485-061-1 .
• Otto Pleinert: Israel's View of Austria IV: Waldheim. In: Oliver Rathkolb et al. (Ed.): Seen with different eyes. International perceptions of Austria 1955–1990. Austrian National History Volume 2. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99105-2 , pp. 783–798 (with chronology p. 800).

Documentation

• The Austrian documentary Waldheims Walzer was released in 2018 and was selected by the Association of the Film and Music Industry (FAMA) as the Austrian candidate for the best foreign language film at the 2019 Academy Awards .
• The Waldheim affair. In: orf.at . March 6, 1986. Retrieved September 13, 2019 . 

Web links

• Democracyzentrum.org: Literature on the Waldheim Affair
• Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A case study on dealing with the Nazi past in the late eighties. (Comment in profile June 2, 1986, Report of the Historians' Commission, Waldheim's speech on March 10, 1988)
• ORF.at: Waldheim left a letter (June 2007)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christoph Kotanko (profile no. 17, April 21, 1986, pp. 22-24): certificate of defamation ; see Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 4, note 17 ).
2. ↑ Lukas Wieselberg: "Holocaust": Milestone of Remembrance on orf.at of December 4, 2016, accessed on January 17, 2019.
3. ↑ Simon Wiesenthal: New Accusations About Waldheim Recycle Old Bitterness (Letter to the New York Times, September 29, 1993); Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof (profile, September 4, 2010): Nazi hunter, Mossad agent, Austrian: From the life of Simon Wiesenthal
4. ↑ JD McClatchy (The Paris Review No. 173, Spring 2005): Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction No. 185
5. ^ David Kranzler , Gutta Sternbuch: Memories of a Vanished World. Feldheim Publishers, 1st edition 2005, ISBN 1-58330-779-6 , p. 86.
6. ^ Hillel Seidman: United Nations, Perfidy and Perversion. MP Press Incorporated, New York 1982, ISBN 0-918220-11-4 , foreword p. IX.
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Herbert Lackner (Profil.at, June 23, 2007): Contemporary history: duty and darkness. On the death of former Federal President Kurt Waldheim.
8. ^ Letter from Stephen Solarz to the CIA, March 27, 1986 ( Memento of May 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (facsimile); Kevin C. Ruffner (CIA History, April 14, 2007): CIA's Support to the Nazi War Criminal Investigations: A Persistent Emotional Issue
9. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A Case Study ... , 1997, p. 356.
10. ^ Kurt Waldheim: Im Glaspalast der Weltpolitik , Econ-Verlag, 2nd edition, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-430-19453-9 , p. 42.
11. ^ Election poster of the ÖVP from 1986.
12. ↑ ^{a b} Ruth Wodak et al: “We are all innocent perpetrators!” Discourse-historical studies on post-war anti-Semitism. Suhrkamp 1990, pp. 60 ff. ( PDF pp. 2-4 ).
13. ^ Melanie A. Sully: A contemporary history of Austria. Routledge, London / New York 1990, p. 82.
14. ↑ Roland Widder, Herbert Dachs (Ed.): History of the Austrian federal states since 1945 . Burgenland. From the borderland in the east to the gateway to the west. tape 5 . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-205-98786-1 , p. 449 .
15. ↑ Christoph Kotanko, Alfred Worm: The file run. profile 34/24. August 1987, pp. 10-13.
16. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 15, note 64 ; no source cited).
17. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer : Turn of Time. The SPÖ - FPÖ coalition 1983-1987 in historical analysis . From the point of view of political actors and in cartoons by Ironimus . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77770-0 , 1986 - An election of the Federal President, not like any other, p. 490 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
18. ↑ Martin Haidinger: School of maneuverability . In: The press . March 14, 2010, p. 22 ( online [accessed September 5, 2019]).
19. ↑ Salzburger Nachrichten, February 28, 2006: "SPÖ has overestimated itself"
20. ^ Austria: Fredi and Kurti . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1987, pp. 110-112 ( Online - Aug. 24, 1987 ).
21. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer : Turn of Time. The SPÖ - FPÖ coalition 1983-1987 in historical analysis . From the point of view of political actors and in cartoons by Ironimus . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77770-0 , 1986 - An election of the Federal President, not like any other, p. 489 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
22. ^ Ernst Hofbauer: The Waldheim plot. A political moral story. Vienna 1998, p. 157 (additionally claims an agreement between Tidl and the SPÖ).
23. ↑ Kurt Waldheim: How it really was. The story of a research. Radio FRO , January 12, 2016, accessed on October 14, 2017 (alleged blackmailing of Mocks from 9:50 p.m., photo from 7:10 p.m.).  
24. ↑ Georg Tidl : Kurt Waldheim - How it really was. The story of a research . 1st edition. Löcker Verlag, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-85409-781-5 . Otto Kumm : 7th SS mountain division “Prinz Eugen” in the picture . 1st edition. Munin-Verlag , Osnabrück 1983, ISBN 3-921242-54-1 , p.
     116 .
25. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al., 1990, PDF p. 7
26. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer : Turn of Time. The SPÖ - FPÖ coalition 1983-1987 in historical analysis . From the point of view of political actors and in cartoons by Ironimus . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77770-0 , 1986 - An election of the Federal President, not like any other, p.  495 ( limited preview in the Google book search): “This assumption is also obvious because Rosenbaum's secretive informant dropped the sentence at the conspiratorial meeting that Chancellor Sinowatz later used in a press conference and became a popular phrase in the election campaign. Sinowatz explained ironically that he noticed that Kurt Waldheim had never been with the SA, only his horse. "
27. ↑ Herbert Lackner : The story of a research. profile , March 18, 2006, accessed October 14, 2017 .  
28. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 73.
29. ↑ ^{a b} Ruth Wodak et al .: The "campaign" and the campaign with the "campaign" - the "Waldheim affair". In: Ruth Wodak, Johanna Pelikan, Peter Nowak , Helmut Gruber, Rudolf DeCilla, Richard Mitten (eds.): “We are all innocent perpetrators!” Discourse-historical studies on post-war anti-Semitism . Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 65 ( PDF p. 5 ).
30. ^ John Tagliabue (The New York Times, March 4, 1986): Files show Kurt Waldheim served under War Criminal (for a fee).
31. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al .: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF p. 8 and note 15 ).
32. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al .: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF p. 10 and note 20/21 ).
33. ↑ Quoted by Ruth Wodak and others: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF p. 12 ).
34. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992. , 1996 ( PDF p. 9 ).
35. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al .: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF p. 11, note 26 ).
36. ↑ ^{a b} Ruth Wodak et al .: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF p. 34 ).
37. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 45, note 193 ).
38. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al .: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF pp. 13-14 ).
39. ↑ Austria: Ridiculously agile . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1986, pp. 155-156 ( Online - Apr. 28, 1986 ). ; for special treatment see Military History Research Office (ed.): Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft, 1939 to 1945: Exploitation, Interpretations, Exclusion. The German Reich and the Second World War , Volume 9, Part 2. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005, ISBN 3-421-06528-4 , p. 482.
40. ↑ Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1986: British Order Probe of Possible Waldheim Link to Lost Commandos .
41. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al .: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF pp. 11-12 ).
42. ↑ Hans-Peter Martin, Hans Hoyng: Spiegel conversation: "Waldheim is a completely immoral man". The President of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman, on Austria, Chancellor Kohl and anti-Semitism . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1986, pp. 147-161 ( Online - Dec. 1, 1986 ).
43. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al: The "Waldheim Affair" , p. 71 f. ( PDF p. 18 f. )
44. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A Case Study ... , Vienna 1997, p. 358.
45. ↑ Quoted from Moshe Zuckermann (ed.): German history of the 20th century in the mirror of German-language literature. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-685-7 , p. 148.
46. ^ Christian Pape: Waldheim Affair . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism , Vol. 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 427 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
47. ↑ Le Monde, May 3, 1986. Quoted from Ruth Wodak and others: The “Waldheim Affair” ( PDF p. 27, note 69 ).
48. ↑ ^{a b} Associated Press / Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1986: Waldheim Now Admits a Role in 'Pacification'
49. ↑ Inge Cyrus, Dieter Wild, Hans-Peter Martin: Spiegel interview: “I don't feel responsible for it” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1986, pp. 152-157 ( Online - Apr. 14, 1986 ).
50. ^ Ari Rath: Autobiography. In: Erika Weinzierl, Otto D. Kulka (eds.): Expulsion and new beginnings. Israeli citizens of Austrian origin. Boehlau, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-205-05561-6 , pp. 536-538; Ari Rath (Der Standard, August 18, 2012): Waldheim: An Austrian Affair
51. ↑ Example: Die Zeit, November 7, 1986: Waldheim's stories
52. ↑ Examples: Nadine Hauer: Die Mitläufer, or, The inability to ask: Effects of National Socialism on today's democracy. Leske + Budrich, 1994, p. 122; Rupert Hartl: Who does Hitler belong to? where does Austria belong? A critical essay on the Austrian understanding of the state and history after German reunification. Ennsthaler, 1995, p. 23; Stanley Cohen: States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Blackwell Publishers, 2000, ISBN 0-7456-2392-1 p. 125 ; Kurt Rudolf Fischer: Emigration to Shanghai , in: Friedrich Stadler: Displaced Reason I. Lit Verlag, 2nd edition 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7372-2 p. 511
53. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 67 f.
54. ↑ Ruth Wodak, Johanna Pelikan, Peter Nowak , Helmut Gruber, Rudolf DeCilla, Richard Mitten: "We are all innocent perpetrators!" Discourse-historical studies on post-war anti-Semitism . Suhrkamp 1990, chap. 3 ( PDF, especially p. 6 f. ), Chap. 4, p. 162 f.
55. ^ Press conference SPÖ head Sinowatz - Blecha - Fischer zu Waldheim. (Audio) In: Mittagsjournal . Austrian Media Library , March 11, 1986, accessed on October 15, 2017 (original quote from 30:40).  
56. ^ Christian Pape: Waldheim Affair . In: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Vol. 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 427 (accessed via De Gruyter Online); Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 73.
57. ↑ Ruth Wodak et al.: The "Waldheim Affair" ( PDF p. 37 and p. 27, note 66 ).
58. ↑ Ruth Wodak: “We are all innocent perpetrators!” , 1990, chap. 4, pp. 136 f., 160 f .; Otto Schulmeister: Garbage dump Austria , in: Die Presse, 27./28. June 1987. Quoted from Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , PDF p. 30 .
59. ↑ We Austrians choose who we want . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1986, pp. 138-151 ( Online - Apr. 14, 1986 ).
60. ↑ derstandard.at, January 15, 2006: The “now even more” electoral movement
61. ↑ Peter Berger: Brief History of Austria in the 20th Century , Facultas Universitätsverlag, 2nd edition 2008, ISBN 3-7089-0354-4 , p. 382.
62. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer : Turn of Time. The SPÖ - FPÖ coalition 1983-1987 in historical analysis . From the point of view of political actors and in cartoons by Ironimus . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77770-0 , p. 189 ( limited preview in Google Book search). Salzburger Nachrichten, February 28, 2006: The Waldheim affair 20 years ago - two views from contemporary witnesses - two different perceptions
    
63. ↑ Speech printed in: Andreas Khol, Theo Faulhaber, Günther Ofner: The Campaign - Kurt Waldheim - Victim or Perpetrator - Backgrounds and scenes of a media justice case. Herbig, 2nd edition, Munich / Berlin 1987, pp. 347-353.
64. ↑ Evelyn Adunka: The fourth community: the history of the Viennese Jews from 1945 to today. Volume 6 of History of the Jews in Vienna. Philo, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-8257-0163-8 , p. 485 ff.
65. ↑ Helga Embacher: A new beginning without illusions. Jews in Austria after 1945. Picus Verlag, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-85452-290-8 , p. 259.
66. ^ Shlomo Avineri: The role of the "World Jewish Congress" , in: Kurier, August 8, 1987.
67. ↑ Thomas Chaimowicz: Österreichisches Dilemma , in: Neue Kronenzeitung, October 27, 1987. Both articles quoted by Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..." The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 PDF p. 10
68. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A case study ... , 1997, p. 362 f.
69. ↑ Christa Zöchling: Haider: Light and shadow of a career. Molden, 1999, p. 135 f.
70. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim affair: A case study , 1997, p. 363 f.
71. ^ Esther Schollum: The Waldheim campaign in the Austrian and international media. In: Andreas Khol, Theo Faulhaber, Günther Ofner: The Campaign - Kurt Waldheim - Victim or Perpetrator - Backgrounds and scenes of a media justice case. Herbig, 2nd edition, Munich / Berlin 1987, p. 35 f.
72. ^ Hella Pick: Guilty Victims: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider. Tauris IB 2000, ISBN 1-86064-618-2 , p. 161.
73. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A Case Study ... , 1997, pp. 359 f., 363 and 387, note 34, p. 388, note 49.
74. ↑ ^{a b} Austria: Destructive judgment . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1987, pp. 116-118 ( Online - Dec. 14, 1987 ).
75. ↑ It used to be a reason for war . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1987, pp. 138-142 ( online - 4 May 1987 ).
76. ↑ News.at, June 15, 2007: USA defends watchlist decision: Waldheim's death does not change the decision
77. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF pp. 17, 24 ).
78. ^ ^{A b} Hella Pick: Guilty Victims: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider. 2000, p. 162.
79. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 18 ).
80. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A case study ... , 1997, pp. 367 and 389, note 64.
81. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 75.
82. ↑ Austria: Like a supplicant . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1986, pp. 170-171 ( online - October 6, 1986 ).
83. ↑ Waldheim invites itself . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1987, pp. 113 ( Online - June 22, 1987 ).
84. ↑ Austria: Due attention . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1987, pp. 101-102 ( Online - June 29, 1987 ).
85. ^ Roberto Suro (New York Times, July 26, 1987): John Paul holds Waldheim Meeting
86. ↑ Otto Pleinert: Israel's view of Austria. In: Oliver Rathkolb and others: Seen with different eyes. International perceptions of Austria 1955–1990. Austrian national history after 1945. Böhlau, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-99105-2 , pp. 786–796.
87. ↑ Chicago Sun-Times, August 15, 1987: Waldheim breaks ice, meets Kohl ( Memento from April 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
88. ↑ Stephen Kinzer (New York Times, March 27, 1992): Kohl to Join Waldheim at a Lunch in Munich
89. ^ Bernard Cohen, Luc Rosenzweig: The Waldheim Complex. 1987, p. 15.
90. ↑ Chroniknet: October 27, 1988
91. ↑ Otto M. Maschke: Search for understanding - Austria in the view of the Netherlands. In: Oliver Rathkolb and others: Seen with different eyes. International perceptions of Austria 1955–1990. Austrian national history after 1945. Vienna 2002, p. 383.
92. ^ Melanie A. Sully: A contemporary history of Austria. Routledge, London / New York 1990, p. 93.
93. ↑ Reuters / Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1987: Critical Waldheim Letter Was a Fake, Jerusalem Post Says
94. ↑ Austria: Full in the nettles . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1987, pp. 145-146 ( Online - May 18, 1987 ).
95. ↑ Associated Press / New York Times, July 3, 1988: Waldheim Cancels Suit Against Bronfman
96. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A Case Study ... , 1997, p. 366.
97. ^ Die Presse, June 30, 1987: Josef Hindels: Lone Fighters and Guardians of the Grail. He threw the stone into the water at Waldheim. According to Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A Case Study ... , 1997, pp. 372 and 391, note 83.
98. ↑ Michael John: A letter to Edgar Bronfman on liqua.net, accessed February 17, 2018; cited by .In: Cornelius Lehnguth: Waldheim and the consequences: The partisan handling of National Socialism in Austria . Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2013, p. 115.
99. ↑ ^{a b} Spiegel dispute: “We will be a European banana republic” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1987, pp. 90-95 ( online - 20 July 1987 ).
100. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 27 f. And p. 13, fn. 59 ).
101. ↑ Peter Huemer (Die Presse, May 27, 2006): We were there
102. ↑ Austria's Jews are afraid again . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1987, pp. 94-96 ( Online - July 6, 1987 ).
103. ↑ ^{a b} Melanie A. Sully: A contemporary history of Austria ; Routledge, London / New York 1990, pp. 88, 104.
104. ↑ Kurt Waldheim . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1987, pp. 270 ( Online - Apr. 13, 1987 ).
105. ↑ Michael Gehler: "... a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man ..."? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 19 f. )
106. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A Case Study ... , 1997, p. 370.
107. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study ... , 1997, p. 371 ff.
108. ↑ US State Department: Nazi Disclosure Act , 2000 (copy from Jewish Virtual Library) (PDF; 355 kB); Time / CNN, February 8, 1988: Austria In Search of the Smoking Gun
109. ^ Yugoslavia: Miraculous Change . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1988, pp. 112-116 ( online - 15 February 1988 ).
110. ↑ Rearview mirror: Quotes, Der Spiegel reported ... In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1988, pp. 322 ( Online - Oct. 17, 1988 ).
111. ↑ Example: Washington Post, October 30, 1986: Waldheim Recruited As Spy, Ex-yugoslav Agents Say
112. ↑ Ralph Blumenthal (New York Times, February 5, 1988): Questions on Waldheim and Reprisal
113. ^ Rolf Steininger, Thomas Albrich , Michael Gehler: Austria in the 20th century: a study book in two volumes. Böhlau, 1997, ISBN 3-205-98310-6 , p. 393.
114. ↑ Hans Rudolf Kurz, James L. Collins, Hagen Fleischer, Gerald Fleming, Manfred Messerschmidt, Jean Vanderwelkenhuyzen, Jehuda L. Wallach: The Waldheim Report , Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen, 1993, ISBN 87-7289-206-4 , p. 7, p. 19f.
115. ^ The report of the International Commission of Historians. Profile, documents, Wirtschafts-trend-Zeitschriftenverlag, 1988, p. 43; quoted by Michael Gehler, Hubert Sickinger (ed.): Political affairs and scandals in Austria: from Mayerling to Waldheim. Kulturverlag, 1995, ISBN 3-85400-005-7 , p. 651.
116. ^ The report of the International Commission of Historians. 1988, p. 203
     quoted by Rolf Steininger, Michael Gehler: Austria in the 20th Century: From the Second World War to the Present. Böhlau, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-205-98310-6 , p. 405.
117. ↑ Only Waldheim still holds Waldheim . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1988, pp. 110-112 ( Online - Feb. 15, 1988 ).
118. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study ... , 1997, pp. 376 f. And 393, note 105.
119. ↑ Reuters / New York Times, February 23, 1988: Socialists assert Waldheim must go
120. ↑ ^{a b} Austria: We cannot go on living like this . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1988, pp. 140-141 ( Online - Feb. 22, 1988 ).
121. ^ Leonard Silk (New York Times, February 19, 1988): Economic Scene; Austria's Shift On Waldheim
122. ↑ Joseph H. Kaiser: In the dispute over a head of state. On the causa Federal President Waldheim , 1988, pp. 14–31; lectures at Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study ... , 1997, pp. 374 f. And 392, note 96.
123. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992 , 1996 ( PDF p. 34 f. )
124. ^ Howell Raines (New York Times, March 8, 1988, p. 1): Waldheim Pressed on Case of British POW's
125. ↑ Joachim Riedl (Die Zeit, June 10, 1988): Tribunal against Kurt Waldheim: Search for the "smoking gun"
126. ^ Brenda Maddox (New York Times, May 29, 1988): Television Turns Tribunal: Waldheim on Trial ; John J. O'Connor (New York Times, June 6, 1988): TV 'Commission' clears Waldheim
127. ^ ^{A b} Siegfried Kogelfranz: Waldheim - "the noose is tightening" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1988, pp. 128-134 ( Online - Jan. 25, 1988 ).
128. ↑ Reuters / New York Times, January 23, 1988: Parliament in Vienna Bars a Waldheim Talk
129. ↑ Full text of the speech in Doc. 3 on the website of the ZIS Contemporary History Information System of the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck ; quoted by Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 67 f.
130. ↑ Examples: Associated Press / Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1988: Waldheim Apologizes for Nazi Crimes: But Austria President Ignores His Own Controversial Past ; Serge Schmemann (New York Times, March 11, 1988): Waldheim Apologizes for War Crimes by Austrians
131. ^ Howell Raines (New York Times, March 8, 1988, p. 2): Waldheim Pressed on Case of British POW's
132. ↑ Sydney Morning Herald, March 4, 1988: Waldheim Role Alleged in Murder
133. ↑ Christopher Montague Woodhouse: The Struggle for Greece, 1941-1949. C. Hurst & Co Publishers Limited, 2002, ISBN 1-85065-492-1 p. XXIII (foreword by Richard Clogg) and p. XXV, notes 8 and 10; Douglas Martin (New York Times, March 4, 2001): CM Woodhouse, Writer on Modern Greece, Dies at 83
134. ^ Ministry of Defense, Great Britain (ed.): Review of the results of investigations carried out by the Ministry of Defense in 1986 into the fate of British servicemen captured in Greece and the Greek Islands between October 1943 and October 1944 and the involvement, if any, of the then Lieutenant Waldheim. Verlag HMSO, 1989, ISBN 0-11-772664-8 .
135. ↑ Neal M. Sher and others (eds.): The Matter of Kurt Waldheim (PDF, pp. 1–3; 66.0 MB)
136. ^ Hermann Frank Meyer: The memories of Hans Wende, 1942 to 1944 "clerk for gang matters" in the "command department Ic" of the high command of Army Group E, Greece
137. ↑ ^{a b} Melanie A. Sully: A contemporary history of Austria. Routledge, London / New York 1990, pp. 81 and 86.
138. ↑ Michael Gehler : The Waldheim affair: A case study ... , 1997, p. 372.
139. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A case study ... , 1997, p. 378 f.
140. ↑ Hans Georg Heinrich, Manfried Welan: The Federal President. In: Herbert Dachs, Peter Gerlich, Herbert Gottweis (eds.): Handbook of the Austrian political system. The second republic. Verlag Manz'sche, 3rd edition, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-214-05967-X (1st edition: pp. 134-139).
141. ↑ Bernd Marin: "Anti-Semitism without anti-Semites": Authoritarian prejudices and enemy images. Campus Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-593-36612-6 , p. 680.
142. ↑ Joachim Riedl (Die Zeit, June 20, 2007): Kurt Waldheim's legacy: What does it take to be a great Austrian?
143. ^ Heinrich Neisser, Sonja Puntscher Riekmann (ed.): Europeanization of Austrian politics? Consequences of EU membership. Facultas wuv Universitätsverlag, 2002, ISBN 3-85114-680-8 , p. 40 f.
144. ↑ Melanie A. Sully: A contemporary history of Austria ; Routledge, London / New York 1990, pp. 79-81.
145. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim affair: A case study , 1996, p. 355 f.
146. ↑ Kurier editorial of June 27, 1987. Quoted from Michael Gehler: “… a grotesquely exaggerated demonization of a man”? The Waldheim Affair 1986–1992. 1996, PDF p. 21 .
147. ↑ Michael Gehler (PDF; 479 kB), ibid. P. 46.
148. ^ Anton Pelinka: On the Austrian identity: between German unification and Central Europe. Ueberreuter, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-8000-3360-7 , p. 46 f.
149. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 84 f.
150. ^ Dietrich Seybold: History culture and conflict: Historical-political controversies in contemporary societies. Peter Lang, Bern 2005, ISBN 3-03910-622-8 , p. 53 f.
151. ↑ Heidemarie Uhl : Between Reconciliation and Disturbance. Böhlau, Vienna 1998, p. 86.
152. ↑ Jörg Richter: Germany: (un) mastered pasts. Dgvt-Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-87159-036-3 , p. 81; Sabine Falch, Mosche Zimmermann: Israel - Austria: from the beginnings to the Eichmann trial in 1961. Studien Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-7065-1954-2 , p. 201; Heiner Timmermann: Coming to terms with the past in Europe in the 20th century Volume 1, Lit Verlag, 1st edition 2010, ISBN 3-643-10862-1 , p. 82.
153. ↑ Helga Embacher: A new beginning without illusions. Jews in Austria after 1945. Vienna 1995, p. 260.
154. ↑ on this Walter Manoschek : The Wehrmacht Exhibition in Austria. A report. In: Mittelweg 36, journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, 5th year, issue 1, February / March 1996, pp. 25–35.
155. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair. A case study on the instrumentalization of the Nazi past for the creation of political advantages 1986–1988. In: History in Science and Education 69, Issue 1/2 (2018), p. 81 ff.
156. ↑ Photography: Hrdlicka horse in Vienna ; Replica model 2006
157. ↑ Kurt Waldheim . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1987, pp. 177 ( online - July 6, 1987 ).
158. ↑ Kuno Knöbl: The story of the Waldheim wooden horse
159. ↑ Milo Dor: The corpse in the basement. Documents of resistance to Dr. Kurt Waldheim. Picus, ISBN 3-85452-205-3 ; “Our republic was based on a lie” - Marion Hussong in conversation with Milo Dor on the subject of “Coming to terms with the past in Austrian literature”. (Vienna 1998)
160. ↑ Josef Haslinger: Politics of feelings. An essay about Austria. Fischer, revised new edition, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-596-12365-8 .
161. ↑ Matthias Beilein: 86 and the consequences: Robert Schindel, Robert Manasseh and Doron Rabinovici in the literary field in Austria. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-503-09855-0 , p. 41.
162. ↑ Elfriede Jelinek: In the Waldheimen and on the Haidern
163. ^ Rowohlt Theaterverlag: Elfriede Jelinek: President Abendwind. A dramolet, very loosely based on Johann Nestroy
164. ↑ Die Zeit, August 7, 1988: Time mosaic
165. ^ Telephone call printed in: Roger Fritz, Ottfried Fischer: Extrem Bayrisch. Südwest Verlag, 2010, ISBN 3-517-08645-2 ; Bayerischer Rundfunk, July 30, 2010: Ottfried Fischer in conversation with Torsten Münchow (PDF; 48 kB).
166. ^ Gerhard Roth (Die Zeit, August 14, 1988): The stranglehold of the people's feeling
167. ↑ Peter Csendes, Ferdinand Opll: Vienna, history of a city. Volume 3: From 1790 to the present. Böhlau, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-205-99268-7 , pp. 812-815.
168. ↑ Did you know that ... In: Kronen Zeitung . February 5, 2018, p. 20 .
169. ↑ EAV.at, lyrics: Kurti ( Memento from January 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
170. ↑ When you have to go ( Memento from January 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
171. ^ Waldheim against uncertainty . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1988, pp. 202 ( Online - Mar. 28, 1988 ).
172. ↑ metrolyrics.com: Lou Reed: Good Evening Mr. Waldheim Lyrics
173. ^ Die Zeit, June 20, 2007: Kurt Waldheim's legacy
174. ↑ Publisher: White Hole . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1995, p. 249 ( Online - Mar. 6, 1995 ).
175. ↑ Michael Gehler: The Waldheim Affair: A case study , 1995, p. 382 f.
176. ↑ ORF.at, June 14, 2007: The Waldheim affair and its consequences
177. ↑ Krone.at: Dr. Kurt Waldheim: "One last word" ( Memento from September 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
178. ^ Archdiocese of Vienna: Sermon on the Requiem by former Federal President Waldheim ( Memento from July 29, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
179. ↑ Der Standard, June 23, 2007 Speech by Heinz Fischer in full.
180. ↑ including Joachim Riedl : Erinnern.at: Kurt Waldheim is dead
181. ^ New York Times, June 15, 2007: Kurt Waldheim, Former UN Chief, Is Dead at 88
182. ↑ Briefly noted . In: Wiener Zeitung . No.  172 , September 5, 2018, p. 23 ( Online [accessed September 13, 2019]).