Election and Waldheim Affair Ercole Roncaglia (on his right),
Wehrmacht Colonel Macholz (on his left) and SS General
Artur Phleps (with briefcase) at Podgorica airfield in Montenegro during
Case Black, 22 May 1943. This photograph caused much controversy when it was published while Waldheim was running in the
1986 Austrian presidential election.|alt=an Italian officer and three German officers in uniform standing beneath the wing of an aircraft on a grassed airfield Waldheim had unsuccessfully sought election as
President of Austria in 1971, but his second attempt on 8 June 1986 proved successful. During his campaign for the presidency in 1985, what became known internationally as the "Waldheim affair" began. Before the
presidential elections, investigative journalist
Alfred Worm revealed in the Austrian weekly news magazine
Profil that Waldheim's recently published autobiography had several omissions about his life between 1938 and 1945. Waldheim had previously claimed to have received a
medical discharge after being wounded in winter 1942. His aides at the United Nations even accused the
Israeli mission of spreading rumors that he supported the Nazis. Israeli ambassador
Yehuda Zvi Blum denied the charges, saying, "We don't believe Waldheim ever supported the Nazis and we never said he did. We have many differences with him, but that isn't one of them." A short time later, beginning on 4 March 1986, the
World Jewish Congress alleged that Waldheim had lied about his service in the mounted corps of the
SA and had concealed his service as a special missions staff officer (Ordonnanzoffizier) for Germany's
Army Group E in Yugoslavia and Greece, from 1942 to 1944, based primarily on captured German wartime records held at the United States National Archives in Washington, DC, and in other archives. The 23 March 1986 public disclosure by the World Jewish Congress that the organization had unearthed the fact that the United Nations War Crimes Commission concluded after the war that Waldheim was implicated in Nazi mass murder and should be arrested arguably transformed the Waldheim affair into the most sensational of all post-war Nazi scandals. Waldheim called the allegations, which grew in magnitude in the ensuing months, "pure lies and malicious acts". Nevertheless, he admitted that he had known about
German reprisals: "Yes, I knew. I was horrified. But what could I do? I had either to continue to serve or be executed." Stolen Jewish art remained public property a generation after the Waldheim affair. Because the revelations leading to the Waldheim affair came shortly before the presidential election, there has been speculation about the background of the affair. Declassified documents from the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency show that the CIA had been aware of some details of his wartime past since 1945. Information about Waldheim's wartime past was also previously published by a pro-German Austrian newspaper,
Salzburger Volksblatt, during the 1971 presidential election campaign, including the claim of an SS membership, but the matter was supposedly regarded as unimportant or even advantageous for the candidate at that time. In view of the ongoing international controversy, the Austrian government decided to appoint an international committee of historians to examine Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945. Their report found no evidence of any personal involvement in those crimes. Although Waldheim had stated that he was unaware of any crimes taking place, the committee cited evidence that Waldheim must have known about war crimes. The International Committee in February 1988 concluded that Waldheim had been "in close proximity to some Nazi atrocities, knew they were going on and made no attempt to stop them". The committee also noted that "he only had very minor possibilities to act against the injustices happening".
Allegations of war crimes On 27 April 1987, the United States
Departments of Justice and
of State announced that evidence amassed in an investigation conducted by the Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had established a
prima facie case that Waldheim participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution during World War II and therefore that his entry into the United States was prohibited by federal statute. This marked the first time that a head of state had been put on an immigration watchlist. The 232-page internal Department of Justice 9 April 1987 investigative report was released in 1994 by that agency, and it is available at the agency's website. The report catalogues evidence that, the U.S. government concluded, proved that Waldheim had taken part in, among other actions: the transfer of civilian prisoners to the SS for exploitation as slave labor; the mass deportation of civilians—including Jews from Greek islands and the town of
Banja Luka,
Yugoslavia—to
concentration and
death camps; the utilization of
antisemitic propaganda; the mistreatment and execution of Allied prisoners; and reprisal executions of hostages and other civilians. Additional allegations of participation in Nazi crimes, with citations to captured Nazi documents and other records, were leveled in a 1993 book by
Eli Rosenbaum, the former U.S. federal prosecutor who had directed the World Jewish Congress investigation that led to the
New York Times initial exposure of Waldheim's hidden Nazi-era past in 1986. The book also alleged that the Soviet Union was aware of Waldheim's alleged involvement in Nazi crimes and that, after vetoing other candidates in order to get Waldheim installed as U.N. Secretary General in 1972, used that information to extract concessions at the United Nations that facilitated KGB espionage in the United States, and that the CIA's failure to anticipate this possibility was a major failure for the intelligence agency. In a letter to the editor published in
Foreign Affairs magazine two years after Rosenbaum's book was released, former Finnish ambassador to the U.N.
Max Jakobson (one of the candidates whom the USSR had vetoed) wrote, "The Soviets knew everything about Waldheim. That is why they preferred him." Throughout his term as President (1986–1992), Waldheim was officially deemed
persona non grata by the United States and, officially or informally, by nearly every other nation in the world outside the Arab world. Not all evidence was weighted against Waldheim.
Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Bruce Ogilvie was captured in civilian clothing, carrying a stolen German pistol, on
Leros, Greece, in 1943, and was taken to Athens along with other prisoners captured under circumstances that might have led to their executions had not Waldheim exchanged their identity tags for those of Allied soldiers killed in action. ==Later years and death==