In the meantime, Congress passed a law, the Holtzman Act, named after a Congresswoman who introduced it. Then we supported him to be Secretary General of the United Nations. I didn’t deal with him because he was much above my level. When I was in Vienna, Waldheim was Political Director of the Foreign Ministry. He probably signed some papers that had to do with deportations and so on. Well, there was never really any good evidence that tied Waldheim directly to atrocities.ĭid he know that some bad things were going on? Probably. The German occupation in the Balkans was particularly brutal. He had been stationed in Yugoslavia when atrocities were committed. Waldheim had been in the German army and lied about his military service. It was a complicated situation because some years earlier the United States had supported Waldheim’s successful candidacy for United Nations Secretary General and now we were going to ban him as a war criminal from entry into the U.S. On the other hand, I never saw any evidence that would classify him as a war criminal.”īODDE: Kurt Waldheim was President of Austria. If we had done a little more digging, both 19 or whenever it was, we might have found out about him. I said Kurt Waldheim was the perfect Viennese head waiter type, and what the UN needed more than anything else at that time was a Viennese head waiter type as Secretary General.
On the Policy Planning Staff several of the other members and I, who was supposed to know something about Austria, we all had access to all the intelligence that anybody else did. And there was some fear that because of Finland’s position, he might be subject to Soviet pressures. There was a Finnish diplomat named Jacobson who was Finnish and Jewish, who was another candidate running for Secretary General of the UN. should support Waldheim for a second term as Secretary General of the United Nations. Many years later when I was a senior member of the Policy Planning Staff, we were asked whether the U.S. That was the kind of fellow I was looking for. Hans Herbert Macholz, and SS-Gruppenführer Artur Phleps at Podgorica airfield, May 1943.)
(Waldheim, second from left, with Italian General Ercole Roncaglia, Col. That was true….Īnd, it was later discovered, he had served with the Abwehr, which was the German military counter-intelligence, and was probably co-responsible for war crimes. Some Germans had stayed in Austria partly because they thought that the Occupation, which was not called Occupation, would be less rigorous and less de-Nazifying than it was in Germany. SPIRO: My job was to track down members of the former German intelligence services in Austria.
“If we had done a little more digging, we might have found out about him” Both were interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy. William Bodde Jr, interviewed in October 1998, reflects on his time as a staff aide in Vienna during this controversy. Herbert John Spiro, interviewed beginning in April 1994, served from 1945-65 as Chief of Counterintelligence at U.S. for years were abruptly denied, and Holocaust war crimes, initially shadowed by the Cold War, were suddenly brought to light. and Austria encumbered relations for many years afterwards, as visa applicants who had traveled to the U.S. The resulting diplomatic strains between the U.S. Congress had passed the Holtzman Act, named after Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, to legalize the expulsion and prevention of suspected Nazi criminals from the U.S.
However, shortly after he was elected, Waldheim was banned from entering the United States under suspicion of Nazi war crimes. The former Secretary General of the United Nations and Ambassador to France and Canada was initially seen as an obvious choice for the position, which is primarily a ceremonial role. On June 8th, 1986, Kurt Waldheim was elected President of Austria.
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