June 14, 2007
No Captain Von Trapp Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:15 PM EST Kurt Waldheim is dead today at the age of 88. He died of heart failure, not from Waldheimer’s disease, an illness-according to a joke from the 1980s-in which you have trouble remembering that you were once a Nazi. Waldheim has to go down as one of the most successfully mendacious world leaders of the last quarter-century. As a hundred obituaries will soon describe, Waldheim served two terms as secretary-general of the United Nations and then, in 1986, won election as president of his native Austria. He accomplished the latter feat despite the inconveniently timed revelation that he’d spent several years in the 1940s as a Nazi storm trooper. When the Austrian magazine Profil first leveled the allegations against Waldheim, he rejected them entirely, but as information gradually trickled out, it became impossible for his denials to continue. It came out that Waldheim had joined a Nazi student group as early as age 20 and had, as a member of the Sturmabteilung, been attached to a division that committed atrocities in Greece and the Balkans. Looking back at Waldheim’s evolving reaction to the world’s discoveries about his past, it’s quite striking how defensive and unapologetic he was. Asked, on “60 Minutes,” why he omitted the fact of his military service from his 1985 autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, Waldheim replied, “Out of almost 400 pages only 15 deal with my background as a child and youth.” Fair enough. With space constraints like those, it’s easy to see how a minor episode like signing up with the Nazis could get edited out. During the same television appearance, Waldheim also offered a slippery apology, as he put it, to “those of my American friends who felt misled that I left out part of my curriculum vitae.” I’m not sure whether that apology sounds more condescending or insincere, but there’s at least a little of each sentiment in there. Later, when the world learned that Waldheim had earned the Zvonimir combat medal from Nazi-run Croatia, the former diplomat gave a really pitiable, high school excuse. Yes, he said, I won the medal, but so did basically everyone in my unit! Thanks to a combination of good damage control by Waldheim’s campaign and a swelling of defensive, nationalist sentiment among Austrian voters, Waldheim won the Austrian presidency with 53.9 percent of the vote. In a way, though, this was just the beginning of his troubles. Both the American and Soviet ambassadors to Austria failed to attend his inauguration, and the United States put Waldheim on a “watch list” that prevented him from setting foot on American soil. In an attempt to clear his name of war-crimes accusations, Waldheim cooperated with a panel of historians that investigated his World War II service. But while no damning evidence of war crimes emerged, no smoking gun for some Belgian prosecutor to seize upon, the investigation also confirmed a series of inconvenient facts about Waldheim’s military career, corroborating the widespread perception that the Austrian leader was no Captain von Trapp. Waldheim’s name will probably not be especially well remembered; his tenure at the UN was undistinguished and his presidency never truly recovered from the scandal with which it began. His life story, though, is a reminder of just how inescapable the past can be–Waldheim succeeded in escaping his own past, but only for so long. It’s also troubling evidence that Austria still has a ways to go in order to fully come to terms with its role in the Second World War. It’s not really true that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, but it’s hard to see how a country that advances figures like Waldheim and Jörg Haider has tried to understand history at all.
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