Nazi Hunter (71 page)

‘It’s so terrible, so terrible,’ he kept repeating. The next morning, at breakfast, he told her and her mother: ‘If only this war will be over and I survive it,
I’ll devote the rest of my life to working for peace.’ To this day, Susanne Kempers Lederer is convinced her old friend kept his promise.

Back in Vienna early in 1943, Waldheim asked Professor Verdross to assign him a topic for a dissertation that would fulfil the final requirement for his Doctor of Laws degree. Verdross
introduced him to the writings of a nineteenth-century Prussian political theorist, Konstantin Frantz (1817–91).

In his two memoirs –
The Challenge of Peace
(1977) and
In the Eye of the Storm
(1985) – Kurt Waldheim
did
mention that he wrote his dissertation ‘on
the federalist principles of Konstantin Frantz’. In April 1986, during Waldheim’s presidential campaign, the Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles announced that it had unearthed
Waldheim’s ninety-four-page dissertation in the Austrian National Library archives and proclaimed it to be an ‘endorsement’ of Nazi ideology.

While Waldheim’s dissertation was neither delivered nor accepted until 1944, most of it was written in early 1943 during his ‘study leave’ from the Balkan front. This was also
the time when Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim fell in love with a fellow law student, Elisabeth Charlotte Valerie Ritschel. Tall and pretty and pert with her tresses still in pigtails at twenty-one, she
was sometimes called ‘Liselotte’ or ‘Lilo’, later ‘Cissy’. Waldheim writes in his memoirs: ‘Her family had been career officers in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and her father had been seriously wounded during the First World War. When his regiment was finally disbanded, he had become a modestly successful businessman.’ And, Waldheim neglects
to add, a member of the illegal Nazi Party in 1934.

After the Anschluss in 1938, Wilhelm Ritschel became the Nazi chief of the firm he worked for and not only took his family out of the Catholic Church, but enrolled his daughter Elisabeth,
sixteen, in the League of German Maidens, the female Hitler Youth. Two years later, on 20 October 1940, Elisabeth Ritschel, having turned eighteen, applied to the Nazi Party, which granted her
membership number 9027854 on 1 January 1941. The Waldheims (through their lawyer, Dr Theo Petter) claim that after she and Kurt announced
their engagement later in 1943, she
returned to the Church and left the Nazi Party under her fiancé’s influence, but there is no record of her withdrawal.

While Lieutenant Waldheim was away from Arsakli on his highly rewarding study leave, his permanent unit, the 12th German Army, had been absorbed into Army Group E, commanded by General Alexander
Löhr, an Austrian who was executed as a war criminal in Yugoslavia in 1947 for his role in the bombing of Belgrade six years earlier. On 15 January 1943, Adolf Eichmann had come to Salonika to
assemble a team. Alois Brunner, his deputy in Greece; Dieter Wisliceny, his newly named representative in Salonika; Max Merten, a special envoy from Berlin, and General Löhr were chosen to
implement ‘the Final Solution’ in Salonika. Order MV 1237, signed by Merten, required all Jews over the age of five to wear yellow stars and live in designated ghettoes. And Holocaust
historian Gerald Reitlinger, author of
The Final Solution
, said in 1986 that General Löhr was ‘perhaps more implicated in Jewish deportations than any other German Army
commander.’

The deportation of the Jews of Salonika began in the middle of March 1943: the month Waldheim’s leave ended. From mid-March to mid-May, German Army personnel commanded by General Löhr
worked alongside the SS in shipping some 40,000 Greek Jews – one-fifth of the city’s population – to the gas chambers of Poland. Nearly every day, some 2000 Jewish men, women, and
children were crammed into German Army freight trains and hauled off to their doom. It was in Salonika that Eichmann added a lurid, but lucrative, feature to ‘the Final Solution’: each
deportee had to pay his or her own way to the death camps; half-fare for children under ten; those under four rode free, and there were substantial reductions for the return tickets that everybody
sought and nobody used. Eichmann had made elaborate arrangements with the German Ministry of Transport for the Gestapo to be billed by an official agency called the Middle European Travel Bureau,
which also packaged Aryan holidays in the Greek islands and other resorts in the widening spectrum of the Third Reich at half-fare group tariffs. The ‘resettlement’ rate the Gestapo
paid was four pfennigs per kilometre of railroad track per adult. The deportation of the Jews of Salonika cost almost two million marks, which the victims paid – first with their property and
then with their lives.

In March 1986, when Waldheim first acknowledged his years of military service in the Balkans, he claimed that he had returned to duty on 31 March 1943, by flying to
Salonika. But he insisted that a
New York Times
reporter who interviewed him forty-three years later was the first to tell him of the mass deportation of the Jews of Salonika, even though
the assembly point for transports was directly across from the main railway station. ‘I was situated up in the mountains in Arsakli,’ he told the Viennese weekly
profil
.
‘I swear to you that I didn’t have the least thing to do with the deportation of Jews. I swear to you that I have just found out about it from the press.’ Asked by the German
weekly
Der Spiegel
whether he hadn’t at least seen people wearing yellow stars, Waldheim replied: ‘Not a one of them.’

When Colonel Roman Loos, the former chief of the German Secret Field Police in the Salonika area, heard this in 1986, he exclaimed incredulously, ‘What?! He didn’t know about that?!
It was known to everybody!’ Said Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith: ‘If he did not know what was going on . . . he was probably the world’s
most incompetent bureaucrat. If he knew, he is a liar.’

‘Yes, he lies,’ Simon Wiesenthal agreed, ‘when he says he never knew about the deportation of the Jews of Salonika when he was there part of the time. How can one-fifth of a
city’s people disappear without someone noticing? To everything people say about him, he answers automatically “No”, so sometimes he has to correct his statements. Through these
lies, he loses all credibility. But that doesn’t make him a war criminal, for a war criminal is a murderer too.’

In April 1986, his memory refreshed by controversy, Waldheim changed his personal military chronology to read ‘returned via Tirana in early July 1943.’ He now maintained that he was
sent directly to the capital of Albania, which was under Italian occupation, as an interpreter. Subsequently, he produced a letter from his commander there and an affidavit from a fellow
interpreter certifying Waldheim’s presence in Tirana around the time he said he was there.

Waldheim’s paybook also showed that, on 2 April 1943, he was in Belgrade, where he collected 1275 Yugoslavian diners in pay and expenses from Field Office 187 for Staff in Transit. One
could quibble, as his critics do, that this still left him time to spend a day or more in Salonika. But a glance at a map shows it to be quite
logical that Lieutenant
Waldheim, while still in the Vienna area, could have been ordered to travel overland to Tirana via Belgrade, while the route from Salonika to Tirana would not have taken him anywhere near Belgrade.
Besides, how much harm could he have done or seen in a few hours in Salonika? It is easy enough to believe that he didn’t encounter a deportation – particularly if he wasn’t there
at all then. What is harder to believe is that he at first ‘remembered’ flying from that momentous home leave to somewhere he later said he wasn’t.

35

A photo from his forgotten-and-then-remembered 1943 Albanian assignment has done Kurt Waldheim more calculable harm than the thousands of words that have been written about his
wartime work. On Saturday, 22 May of that year, Lieutenant Waldheim travelled from Tirana to Podgorica (later Titograd in Yugoslavia), a distance of less than a hundred miles, with his chief,
Colonel Joachim Macholz, to co-ordinate a meeting between an Italian general and a couple of German generals. The famous picture shows four officers standing beside the wing of a plane (sometimes
the wing is cropped out) after bidding farewell to one of the German generals, Rudolf Lüters, who had replaced Bader as German commander in Croatia and was about to fly off to his headquarters
in Zagreb. Of the four on the ground, one is the Italian general, Ercole Roncaglia, and facing him is a
Waffen SS
General, Artur Phleps, holding an attaché case. Between them stand
Colonel Macholz and Lieutenant Waldheim. The tallest, most central, and seemingly most commanding figure in the picture is the low man on the totem pole, Lieutenant Waldheim.

Waldheim’s official defence, ‘The White Book’,
⁷⁶
flies into a frenzy of righteous indignation reflecting the damage done by
that one picture, which was unearthed by an amateur photographer in Innsbruck in 1985:

‘The White Book’ cites Macholz’s testimony that Waldheim was there strictly as an interpreter and adds that ‘in attributing to him the role of a
principal because of his prominence in the photograph, his critics once again ignore the obvious: interpreters invariably appear in photographs with the principals they are serving, usually
standing between them.’

To make matters worse, confronted by a
New York Times
correspondent when the celebrated photo first surfaced at the beginning of March 1986, Waldheim’s initial response was:
‘This is just part of a deliberate hate campaign.’ Later, he would remember only that when, in translating, he softened some of Phleps’ hard language exhorting the Italians to
commit more manpower and energy to the war effort, the SS general – a German of Transylvanian origin – turned to him and murmured: ‘You don’t realize that I know Italian.
Would you please translate what I say?’

Like many interpreters who serve as conduits of fast-moving conversation, Waldheim has no recollection of what he translated that day – and the same might have been true if he’d
tried to recall it that very night. But there is no question that a topic of discussion at Podgorica on 22 May 1943 was Operation Black (
Unternehmen Schwarz
), which had been launched a
week earlier to wipe out partisan resistance in the Yugoslav lands of Montenegro and Croatia. The 6 May operating order from the German command in Croatia had specified that ‘troops must move
against the hostile populace without consideration and with brutal severity.’ On 23 May, the day after Waldheim was photographed with him, General Phleps, as commander of the
Waffen
SS
Prinz Eugen Division, launched a clean-up of the Podgorica area. In 1986, the World Jewish Congress implied that Waldheim’s chief, Colonel Macholz, stayed on to co-ordinate Italian
participation in Operation Black. So where was Waldheim? His response: ‘I don’t remember anything.’

When Operation Black ended that June, more than 16,000 ‘enemies’ of Germany were dead, of whom 12,000 were listed only as ‘communists’. Just 1500
‘enemies’ were held as prisoners.

How did Kurt Waldheim evolve from a discreetly outspoken critic of the Nazi tyranny he served grudgingly as a self-described ‘low-level desk lieutenant’ into a
passive accessory who saw no evil, heard no evil, and, if he spoke any evil, shrouded it in the kind of euphemisms (‘special treatment’, ‘mopping-up’ and ‘cleansing
operations’, etc.) that were the coded language of the Third Reich? Robert Herzstein – a University of South Carolina historian who, working for the World Jewish Congress for ten days
in March 1986, found no fewer than nineteen intelligence reports signed by Waldheim himself in the US National Archives in Washington – insists that, by the end of 1942, ‘Waldheim was a
highly competent, upwardly mobile, politically reliable, high level German intelligence officer.’ But Markus Hartner, a non-commissioned officer who was cartographer for Army Group E in
Waldheim’s section, told Yugoslavian war-crimes investigators in early 1948 that, throughout the time he knew him, Waldheim ‘rejected National Socialism [Nazism], not so much for social
or scientific reasons, but much more for reasons of faith and conservatism.’ Waldheim himself has boasted how Austrian soldiers who opposed the Anschluss greeted each other with a more
Catholic ‘
Grüss Gott
!’ instead of the official ‘
Heil Hitler
!’ And his predecessor in the intelligence job at Arsakli, Dr Werner Schollen, a retired
notary and lawyer more than four decades later, said that Waldheim used to speak openly in the officers’ mess, where ‘he certainly didn’t have a reputation that he supported the
Nazis. He was very critical about them.’