Word: waldheim
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...Waldheim's defenders launched a vigorous campaign this month to clear his name finally. Their heaviest ammunition was a 299-page "white book" prepared on Waldheim's behalf by Foreign Ministry officials. Titled Kurt Waldheim's Wartime Years: A Documentation, the work asserts that all charges against him have been proved false. It repeats claims that Waldheim had no involvement in atrocities committed by German army units to which he was assigned between 1942 and 1944. The troops carried out brutal reprisals against Yugoslav resistance fighters and deported Greek Jews to Nazi death camps. The book further asserts that Waldheim...
...book is unlikely to convince Waldheim's detractors. While critics concede that Waldheim may not personally have committed war crimes, they maintain that he must have known about them as an interpreter with the rank of lieutenant and later as an intelligence officer. They insist that he then strove for four decades to conceal his knowledge. "It cannot suffice to describe Waldheim as a small wheel within wheels who saw nothing, heard nothing and knew nothing," says Hubertus Czernin, a Viennese journalist who has studied Waldheim's record. "He has to be seen in the context...
...plead Waldheim's case, Vienna last week dispatched Fritz Molden, a filmmaker and World War II resistance hero, on a tour of the U.S. and Britain. Molden, who helped hire Waldheim for the Austrian Foreign Ministry after the war but insists that he is not a close friend, said he undertook the mission for Austria's sake. Accompanied by Ralph Scheide, a Waldheim aide and co- author of the white paper, Molden called the Austrian President the victim of a smear campaign. "If you pour two gallons of manure over somebody, he will smell," Molden said, "and then...
...debating the Waldheim furor, some Austrians have displayed an insensitivity toward the President's Jewish critics that has sometimes curdled into outright anti-Semitism. Michael Graff, secretary-general of the People's Party, was forced to resign last month after he told the French magazine L'Express that Waldheim had "no problem" unless he could be proved to have "strangled six Jews single-handedly." On the other hand, in Vienna last week, three neo-Nazis interrupted a nationally televised ceremony honoring Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal with repeated shouts of "Murderer!" When the program's host asked the audience to show...
...President's fate may now rest with a seven-member commission that has been poring over Waldheim's war record since September. Chaired by Hans Rudolf Kurz, a Swiss military historian, the panel has met for a week each month to sift 30 pounds of documents in the red silk-lined chambers of the Austrian State Archives. Scheduled to release its report on Feb. 2, the commission seems certain to go beyond the narrow question of whether Waldheim committed war crimes and to explore such issues as how much Waldheim knew and whether he acted to save lives...