Word: waldheim
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Within hours of Kurt Waldheim's victory in the Austrian presidential runoff on June 8, posters reading BACK TO THE FUTURE began to sprout up around Vienna. Austrian citizens, it seemed, were eager to be done with divisive questions about Waldheim's Nazi past and to let the victorious candidate of the conservative People's Party get on with his job. It was soon apparent, however, that the analgesic effects of the decisive election would not be enough to cure Austria's headache. The very next day, Socialist Chancellor Fred Sinowatz unexpectedly resigned, vowing to devote himself to rebuilding...
...DECADES HE SUCCEEDED brilliantly in the role of the charming, erudite diplomat. But in 1986, when former Secretary-General of the U.N. Kurt Waldheim was running for President of his native Austria, reporters released documents proving that the former German army lieutenant had, contrary to his claims, been aware of and perhaps involved in war crimes, including the deportation of thousands of Jews to death camps during World War II. Waldheim first denied any knowledge of the atrocities and then said he was protecting his family. He maintained that a conspiracy to defame Austria was at the heart...
...question of guilt in a command structure is no less complex now than it was then; Waldheim was no card-carrying Nazi, but he had been an officer in a unit that had a very dirty war in the Balkans. His clean-vest spiel particularly rankled me because I'd been spending a fair amount of time in Banja Luka myself. Less than a year before my interview with Waldheim, the city's principal mosque had been totally razed by Serbs, and most of the Muslim population driven out of the city. In the summer of 1992, Serbs in Banja...
Apparently so, for in his memoirs - the English translation of which bears the weirdly exculpatory title In the Eye of the Storm - Waldheim had simply skipped over his three years of military service in the Balkans. I couldn't fathom how anyone's experiences in a time and place like that could fail to figure in any honest account of a life. When Waldheim made a point of showing me that he was reading Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List - the movie had been released there just a week or so before our interview - I developed a strong sense that...
...true depth of Waldheim's involvement in Banja Luka and elsewhere in the Balkans may never be known for certain. By the end of his life he'd regretted having referred to his military service there as a duty done, and he acknowledged that it was a mistake to have excised the Balkans from his memoirs. More importantly, and largely as a result of what will always be known as the Waldheim Affair, Austria finally got beyond its mythic self-image as the first victim of National Socialism and faced up to its own share of responsibility in Hitler...