![]() Waldheim himself would eventually be stationed in Thessaloniki, where he reported as an Oberleutnant for counter-insurgency efforts (Feindaufklärung) to General Löhr. Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmacht's "honor list" of those responsible for the miltarily successful operation, and from the Croatian side, Waldheim received a silver medal with an oak leaf cluster from the fascist Ustashi leader, Ante Pavelic. Yet decades later Waldheim would maintain "that he did not know about the murder of civilians there." According to one post-war investigator, prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred yards of Waldheim's office., and the Jasenovac concentration camp where prisoners endured the most horrific of tortures was just a few miles away. ![]() Much historical interest has centered around Waldheim's role in Operation Kozara, a particularly ferocious campaign against Tito's partisans in the summer of 1942, in which thousands of partisans and civilians died in battle and in the concentration camps as a result of so-called cleansing operations, in the aftermath of which corpses of civilian hostages were hung on makeshift wooden gallows positioned along the road from Kostajnica to Banja Luka. In 1941 he was apparently wounded.Īccording to his autobiography, he was given a medical discharge and returned to Vienna to pursue his doctoral studies in law, but later documents would come to light revealing that Waldheim's military service continued much later than 1941 by 1943 he was serving in the capacity of an ordnance officer in Army Group E under the direction of General Alexander Löhr, an Austrian who would be executed in 1946 as a war criminal for his roles in suppressing uprisings by Yugoslav partisan forces and arranging the deportations of 40,000 Thessaloniki Jews to Auschwitz. In early 1941 Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad leader. During the controversy he denied actually having signed any registration forms for SA membership. Shortly thereafter he became a registered member of the mounted corps of the SA. Shortly after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Waldheim applied for membership in the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB), a division of the NSDAP. Waldheim himself was politically unaffiliated during these years at the Academy. ![]() Waldheim's father was an active in the Christian Social Party. In 1944, he obtained his law degree at the University of Vienna. He attended the Vienna Consular Academy, where he graduated in 1939. His father was a Roman Catholic school inspector. Waldheim was born in Sankt Andrä-Wördern, a village near Vienna, on December 21, 1918. If you don't know about Kurt Waldheim, here is some info: ![]() “Kurt Waldheim left this worl d with a huge question mark about his past and his activities during World War II,” said Ephraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But they also made him persona non grata in many countries and he made almost no state visits during his tenure. In fact, the accusations, made after he left the United Nations, boosted his poll ratings as president. Most Austrians did not believe Waldheim was linked to Nazi atrocities. Waldheim admitted concealing his service with Hitler’s army in the Balkans but always denied knowing of Nazi war crimes committed there at the time, including deportations of thousands of Greek Jews. Waldheim was head of the United Nations for much of the 1970s before becoming Austrian president, a largely ceremonial role. The domestic APA news agency said he had died of heart failure, quoting Waldheim’s son-in-law. The Austrian presidency and a Waldheim family spokesman announced his death following a short illness. Kurt Waldheim, a former UN chief and Austrian president Whose reputation was tarnished by disclosures he hid his past in Nazi Germany’s officer corps, died on Thursday aged 88. Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations chief and Austrian president
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