by Alan Levy
The 1947 conclusion of the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes that ‘Kurt Waldheim, Austrian, lieutenant, military intelligence office, was a war criminal’ is based on how the perils to Germans on the Stip-Kocani stretch were eradicated in response to the warnings in Waldheim’s reports. For, on Group E’s moving day, 14 October, German troops set fire to three villages – Krupiste, Gorni Balvan, and Dolnyi Balvan – between Stip and Kocani and executed 114 of their inhabitants.
A hundred miles up the road, Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim – who had flown over the three villages the day before when they were still living, breathing places – had already resumed what his ‘White Book’ calls ‘factual reporting of enemy military activity’ which ‘served as a basis for the orientation of the high command, but not for tactical field decisions by local commanders.’ In 1986, Waldheim contended that the massacres hadn’t taken place until 20 October, putting an additional six days between cause and effect. When corrected hours later, he had an alibi anyway: ‘At the date of these atrocities, I was not in the area.’ Nobody had said he was.
More damning than any of his defences was his own report on ‘enemy losses’ for the month of October 1944. Found by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the National Archives in Washington in 1986, Waldheim’s calculation was 739 ‘bandits’ killed and ninety-four taken prisoner. According to the WJC, ‘the tell-tale data in Waldheim’s report is his accompanying notation that these 833 purported resistance fighters had among them only sixty-three weapons (thirteen machine-guns, forty-nine rifles, and a submachine-gun). Thus, it would appear that many, if not most, of those killed were unarmed civilians’ – presumably including the 114 people murdered in the 14 October reprisals in Krupiste, Gorni Balvan, and Dolnyi Balvan.
In 1947, Yugoslavia brought to trial the commander of the 14 October 1944 killing operation between Stip and Kocani: Captain Karl-Heinz Egberts-Hilker from Reconnaissance Battalion 22 of the German Army’s 22nd Infantry Division. The WJC contended that Egberts-Hilker, who was hanged in Belgrade in 1948 for arson and murder, testified that Waldheim was responsible for the reprisal murders of which Egberts-Hilker was accused, and that the order for the operation had come from Waldheim.
The President of Austria’s apologists scoffed at the notion that a low-level lieutenant had such authority and pointed out that in his statement of defence Egberts-Hilker told his Yugoslav judges: ‘I have acknowledged this action from the first day of my interrogation. I have emphasized that I accept the entire responsibility, and that none of my subordinates and soldiers bear any guilt. Nor have I ever tried to shift the blame to my own superiors or use the earlier mentioned “general order” as an excuse.’ In this case, the defendant was referring to a Hitler order that, when German Army units were attacked by partisans, all villages from which the partisans originated should be burned and all male inhabitants between sixteen and sixty killed.
‘I was amazed,’ Kurt Waldheim told me in 1989, ‘when I saw in that war-crime file that I was made responsible for Stip-Kocani. First of all, I couldn’t remember where it was and what it was. But I had to look deeply into the matter and my son Gerhard helped me very nicely to find out that this captain who was executed was a very honest man who took all responsibility himself. Before he died, he wrote a very moving letter to his mother that I have read. It is true that he destroyed these villages – but without any knowledge on my part or anybody else’s. Anyway, there were several levels of command between him and headquarters of Army Group E. He said in his defence that his unit was attacked continuously from those villages. He had the order to protect a bridge so that the German Army could use it. And since he was continuously attacked by partisans from those villages, he then gave the order to destroy them in line with the general orders he had from Hitler. He said in his defence that he did not purposely kill women and children, but he had no choice. He made it crystal clear that he had no specific order to do this, but felt he had to on the basis of the general order. But, because I mentioned these incidents does not make me responsible for them. The language that crossed my desk did not refer to human tragedy, but to “counter-actions” and “self-defence”. If I had seen any of this, I might have been shocked to death, but the way it was expressed, it mentioned “losses”, not women and children.’
Clearly, Waldheim could identify more with his hanged fellow officer than with the eighty-two-year-old peasant from Krupiste who told Newsweek in 1986 how he survived the 1944 massacre only because two dead bodies fell on top of him. ‘For me,’ said Risto Ognjanov, ‘October fourteenth is my second birthday. It was the beginning of my second life.’
The ‘White Book’ introduces a 1986 statement from the colonel who was the 22nd Infantry Division’s operations officer in 1944. He insists that Egberts-Hilker was out of contact with division headquarters in mid-October 1944 and ‘was forced to act independently. He had not – and could not have – received an order for the reprisal action during this withdrawal, neither from the division nor from the corps or even the highest commanding authority in the whole region, Army Group E.’ The colonel concludes that ‘participation of Army Group E, especially of a then-young orderly officer with the rank of first lieutenant like Dr Kurt Waldheim – and thus the inference of a responsibility (on Dr Waldheim’s part) for the measures set off by Captain Egberts-Hilker – is impossible.’
Most tellingly of all, the ‘White Book’ points out that the Yugoslav war crimes file produced by the WJC contains ‘no such statement made by Captain Egberts-Hilker’ implicating Waldheim in the atrocities and that ‘Dr Waldheim’s name is not mentioned at all in that testimony or, for that matter, in Captain Egberts-Hilker’s defence and appeal statements prior to his being executed for that very incident.’ It would indeed appear that the WJC jumped to a conclusion that the defendant must have testified against Waldheim inasmuch as two key witnesses did so at the trial:
• Major Klaus Mellinghoff, General Löhr’s aide-de-camp, who listed Lieutenant Waldheim as part of the chain of command conveying Hitler’s ‘wish for ruthless retaliation measures against the civilian population . . . down to the troops themselves.’
• Sergeant-Major Johann Mayer, who joined Army Group E headquarters in Arsakli as a personnel clerk in April 1944: ‘Lieutenant Waldheim’s job was to propose to his superior, Lieutenant-Colonel Warnstorff, all actions of Ic (Intelligence) and to prepare all the written reports for that purpose. These reports dealt with the question of hostages, retaliation measures, and behaviour with regard to war prisoners and the civilian population.’ Shortly before the German withdrawal from Greece into Yugoslavia, ‘a general order was issued according to which all retaliation measures, hostage questions, etc., should no longer depend upon decisions of field commanders and other troop commanders, but on Army Group E, that is, on its Ic (Intelligence) staff.’
Mayer’s version of his unit’s chain of command was that ‘proposals would be worked out by Lieutenant Waldheim and submitted to his superior, Lieutenant-Colonel Warnstorff. If the latter agreed, he forwarded them for approval to the Chief of the General Staff, General [Schmidt-]Richberg, on whose decision the validation of such orders depended. In trivial cases, when no matter of principle was involved, Lieutenant-Colonel Warnstorff himself could make the decision.’
Army Group E was based in Stari Trg, near Mitrovica, for barely a month. Pristina, the principal city of Kosovo, the Yugoslav region bordering Albania, was fifteen miles to the south. In 1988, the chief archivist of Kosovo said he had seen evidence that Kurt Waldheim was present at the execution of 104 Albanian partisans in Pristina in the autumn of 1944. He said he had seen documents about ‘the massacre of 104 Albanian patriots’ while visiting a Tirana archive on a 1978 trip to Albania. The insular Albanian regime did not respond to requests for confirmation.
On 15 November 1944, Army Group E withdrew another 200 miles northwest through the mountains to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. ‘On one occasion in Sarajevo,’ personnel clerk Johann Mayer te
stified, ‘certain civilians were killed . . . in November/December 1944.’ The case involved some German Army deserters who had formed an anti-fascist underground organization with some Yugoslavs. According to Mayer, ‘orders for shooting them were issued by Section Ic, based on information from the Gestapo . . . This order was issued by the Chief of the General Staff and the Commander of the Army Group.’
The ‘White Book’ points out that, when Yugoslavia submitted its case against Waldheim to the UN War Crimes Commission at the end of 1947 – by which time ex-Lieutenant Waldheim was a rising star in the Austrian Foreign Ministry – the very same testimony by Mayer was altered to read: ‘They were executed according to the order given by Waldheim in retaliation for desertion from the German Army of some other persons. . .’ This later usage, however, is favoured by the WJC and other Waldheim critics.
In 1986, Kurt Waldheim’s initial response to evocation of ghosts from the past (Captain Egberts-Hilker and Sergeant-Major Mayer were both dead and Major Mellinghoff has never been traced) was to clone the hanged war criminal into two different officers he never knew: an ‘Eckbert-Hilcer [whom] not a single member of the surviving officers and staff of Arsakli can remember’, and a ‘Captain Egberts’ who ‘seems to have given orders for the event [the 14 October 1944 massacres between Stip and Kocani], was convicted to death, and executed in Belgrade in 1948.’ Of Mellinghoff, Waldheim spoke to me (in 1989) in the present tense: ‘I can’t remember him and I don’t know why he is so mad at me.’ As for Mayer, Waldheim had ‘never heard of him in 1986. Later, acknowledging that Mayer had indeed worked at Army headquarters, Waldheim branded the deceased a ‘liar’ who was just ‘trying to save his skin’ after being captured by Yugoslav partisans at the end of the war. Somewhat more elegantly, the ‘White Book’ introduced an affidavit from Mayer’s Viennese widow, Rosa, who swore that, from his release from Yugoslavian custody in duly 1948 to his death in 1972, ‘my husband never told me anything about First Lieutenant Waldheim and his relationship to him during the war.’
Nonetheless, the accusations were so damaging in 1986 that Gerhard Waldheim phoned Simon Wiesenthal to implore him: ‘Please, can you help my father?’
‘No,’ said Wiesenthal, ‘your father can help himself. He should call Yugoslavia – or get on the first plane to Belgrade and go there himself and say, “Look, you have these documents and you say you have more. But I feel innocent, so please open up the whole file and release everything you have about me.’”
According to Wiesenthal, Gerhard said: ‘My father is too proud to ask this.’
Wiesenthal did a slow burn into the telephone: ‘Too proud? Too proud! People are calling him “war criminal” and “murderer”, but he is too proud to ask for the truth?’
36
The denazification of Lieutenant Waldheim
‘Shortly before the end of the war, I was stationed in the Trieste area,’ Kurt Waldheim wrote in the 1985 German version of his memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, but not in the 1986 English version. ‘When the German troops in Italy surrendered, I made every effort to avoid capture and reach home.’
Preceded by ‘At the end of my study leave and after my leg had healed, I was recalled to military service’, this paragraph gives short shrift to Lieutenant Waldheim’s 1942–5 military career in the Balkans. His wartime years rate even shorter shrift in the English version, in which those three sentences were deleted for what his ‘White Book’ defence claims at great length were space reasons.
As partisans and Allies narrowed the German hold on Yugoslavia, General Löhr’s Army Group E withdrew from Sarajevo to Nova Gradiska in February 1945 and to Zagreb a month later. There, Lieutenant Waldheim was granted leave in late March and early April to move his pregnant wife from bombarded Vienna to relative safety in the mountains of Styria. In those days of difficulty, deprivation, and destruction as the war drew to an end, the Waldheims reached the village of Ramsau by train, thumb, and foot. Soon after rejoining his unit in Zagreb and receiving his second War Merit Cross – this one First Class, with Swords – the expectant father was reassigned to an infantry division near Trieste.
The direct route from Zagreb to Trieste was already in partisan hands, so Lieutenant Waldheim detoured north into Austria by way of Klagenfurt, but still was unable to make his way south through Italy to Trieste because the German lines were cut off. Returning to Klagenfurt around 1 May 1945, when the German Army capitulated in Italy, he reported himself ‘unable to reach assigned unit’ and, in the absence of further instructions, made his way back to Ramsau two days after his first child, Liselotte, was delivered by a mountain midwife and three days after what he calls – in his memoir’s English version, but not in its German version – ‘Austria’s liberation by the Allied forces.’
With the immediate proclamation of Austria’s revived existence, the Allies ordered all German military personnel to be formally discharged by occupation authorities. On 18 May 1945, Lieutenant Waldheim joined other soldiers in the nearby town of Schladming, where they were taken into custody and trucked across the German border to an American detention camp in Bad Tölz, Bavaria. With no SS tattoo and a non-combatant’s (since 1941) military history as what he called ‘just a sort of clerk’, Waldheim was released by the Americans in June and returned to his wife and infant daughter.
The new father found the timing of Liselotte’s arrival prophetic: ‘The parallel with my own birth was poignant, coming on the heels of a terrible war. I prayed that out of this long agony and immediate desolation the world might fashion an abiding peace so that Liselotte and children everywhere might never again suffer such adversity.’
After a summer living off the land in Styria and on a farm in Upper Austria, the three Waldheims made their way back to Vienna in September and moved in with his parents in suburban Baden-bei-Wien. ‘The pleasures of reunion,’ says Waldheim, ‘were dimmed by the conditions that awaited us. My parents’ house had been bombed and the windows in the part we were due to occupy had all been blown out. We blocked them up as best we could, but we all nearly froze to death that winter. Fuel was hard to come by and material for repairs non-existent, but the biggest problem was finding enough to eat. The only way we survived was to walk far into the countryside and go from farm to farm asking for any surplus they might have for sale.’
A little later, Cissy Waldheim learned that the brand-new United Nations Organization had a Children’s Fund. She sought out its representative in Vienna, where starving citizens were even eating the animals in the royal zoo at Schönbrunn Palace and the nearby Lainzer Tiergarten nature preserve. From UNO, as the UN was called then (and still is in Austria), the Waldheims obtained powdered milk and baby food for Liselotte, who, when she grew up, went to work for the UN in Geneva, not because she was her father’s daughter, but because she owed her life to UNICEF.
Spruced up in his best knickerbockers, his hair combed straight back, and armed with three glowing letters of recommendation from staunch anti-Nazi politicians (two Blacks and one Red) in his old home town of Tulln and a résumé that made only passing mention of military service in the ‘south-east’, Kurt Waldheim appeared at the Austrian Foreign Ministry in Vienna’s Ballhausplatz early in the morning of Monday, 8 October 1945 – having risen well before dawn to walk seven miles from Baden to Mödling, on the outskirts of the capital, and ride a rickety tram for more than an hour into the heart of the city.
Rebuilding Austria’s dismantled diplomatic corps had been entrusted by the Allies to two dynamic young resistance heroes: Karl J. Gruber, a thirty-six-year-old Tyrolean conservative, and, as his deputy, Fritz Molden, a twenty-one-year-old liberal from Vienna who would later enjoy a boom-and-bust career as a publisher of German-language bestsellers. Gruber and Molden had met in Innsbruck during the last days of the war in the struggle to save the city from destruction by the retreating Germans.
Molden was in his office when the tall young applicant with the game leg poked his head in and asked where the Personnel
Office was. They chatted briefly before Waldheim headed down the hall. Having been one of the first twelve postwar candidates to sit for the stiff competitive examination of the newly reconstituted Austrian Foreign Service – and one of only four to pass – Waldheim already owned a certain star status when he walked in. Molden looked on approvingly, for Waldheim’s degrees in law and diplomacy, his foreign languages (English, French, Italian, and, he acknowledged, a smattering of Serbo-Croatian), and the deferential manner in which he clothed his ambition all marked him as a man to watch.
Thus, it came as no surprise to Molden when, a few hours later, Gruber informed him that he was considering Waldheim to be his personal diplomatic secretary. Molden agreed with Gruber that Waldheim’s credentials were impressive, even though both resistance fighters recognized him as, in Molden’s words, ‘a man who is not a hero, not the type of guy who goes into the underground.’ Gruber asked Molden to investigate Waldheim’s past, for he was determined to have no Nazis, communists, or other security risks in any sensitive position in the Ministry.
Molden checked out Waldheim with the Minister of Interior, an old Socialist named Oskar Helmer, as well as with the American CIC and OSS, and came back with not just a clean bill of health, but statements from Nazi files in Lower Austria about the young man’s negative attitude toward Hitlerism. ‘Both CIC and OSS,’ Molden recalls, ‘said “Go ahead. As far as we know, this man was never a Nazi.’”
On the personnel form that Waldheim submitted on 3 November 1945, he answered the section on military service by filling in the blanks for duration with ‘15 Aug. 1939 to 9 May 1945’. . . campaigns: ‘France, Russia, Balkans’ . . . and injuries: ‘large splinter in right lower leg’. Six boxes later, when asked about membership in military clubs, alliances, associations of the Nazi Party (SS, SA, etc.), he noted ‘NS [National Socialist] Riding Corps’. This was a reference to an equestrian society organized by students at the Consular Academy in November 1938, when Waldheim was finishing up his studies there. Though they rode out of a public riding school on the Rasumofskygasse in Vienna, the riding club, like all student equestrian groups, was absorbed into the Nazi SA brownshirted storm troops sometime in 1939, but Waldheim insists he was no longer there and never wore an SA uniform. While this led to a 1985 quip by Socialist Chancellor Fred Sinowatz, Bruno Kreisky’s successor, that Waldheim ‘wasn’t a member of the SA; only his horse was’, so pervasive was the Nazi absorption of existing Austrian organizations that, forty years earlier, Waldheim’s rare acknowledgement was either overlooked or dismissed.