Kurt Josef Waldheim (21 December 1918 – 14 June 2007) was an Austrian diplomat and conservative politician. He was Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and President of Austria from 1986 to 1992. On June 14, 2007, Waldheim died at age 88 of heart failure.^[1] At the time of his death he was the oldest living former Secretary-General of the United Nations and the oldest living former Austrian President.

Waldheim was born in Sankt Andrä-Wördern, a village near Vienna, on December 21, 1918.^[2] His father was a Roman Catholic school inspector. He attended the Vienna Consular Academy, where he graduated in 1939. In 1944, he obtained his law degree at the University of Vienna.

Waldheim's father was an active in the Christian Social Party. Waldheim himself was politically unaffiliated during these years at the Academy. 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^[3]. Shortly thereafter he became a registered member of the mounted corps of the SA. During the controversy he denied actually having signed any registration forms for SA membership.^{[citation needed]}

In early 1941 Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad leader. In 1941 he was apparently wounded.

According 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^[4], 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.

Waldheim himself would eventually be stationed in Thessaloniki, where he reported as an Oberleutnant for counter-insurgency efforts (Feindaufklärung) to General Löhr^{[citation needed]}. In 1986 Waldheim would say that he served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals enacted against civilians locally or of large-scale massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia, but this is contradicted by intelligence reports^{[citation needed]} and eyewitness accounts affirming that he was present at staff meetings where such matters were routinely discussed.^{[citation needed]}

Much historical interest has centered around Waldheim's role in Operation Kozara^{[citation needed]}, 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. According to one post-war investigator, prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred yards of Walheim's office.^[5], and the Jasenovac concentration camp where prisoners endured the most horrific of tortures was just a few miles away. Yet decades later Waldheim would maintain "that he did not know about the murder of civilians there."^[5]

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.

Additionally, in 1944, Waldheim reviewed and approved a packet of anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Russian lines, one of which ended, "enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over."^[6]

In 1945, Waldheim surrendered to British forces in Carinthia, at which point he said he had fled his command post within Army Group E, where he was serving with General Löhr, who was seeking a special deal with the British. After the war, Waldheim was wanted for war crimes by the War Crimes Commission of the United Nations, the very organization he would later head.^[6]

Questions were later raised about Waldheim's truthfulness as to his World War II service (see "The Waldheim Affair," below).

Waldheim joined the Austrian diplomatic service in 1945, after finishing his studies in law at the University of Vienna. He served as First Secretary of the Legation in Paris from 1948, and in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Vienna from 1951 to 1956. In 1956 he was made Ambassador to Canada, returning to the Ministry in 1960, after which he became the Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations in 1964. For two years beginning in 1968, he was the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs in Austria serving for the Austrian People's Party, before going back as Permanent Representative to the U.N. in 1970. He was defeated in the Austrian presidential elections in 1971, but was then elected to succeed U Thant as United Nations Secretary-General the same year (see Video of Kurt Waldheim sworn in as UN-Secretary-General).

As Secretary-General, Waldheim opened and addressed a number of major international conferences convened under United Nations auspices. These included the third session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Santiago, April 1972), the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, June 1972), the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Seas (Caracas, June 1974), the World Population Conference (Bucharest, August 1974) and the World Food Conference (Rome, November 1974). However, his diplomatic efforts particularly in the Middle East were over shadowed by the diplomacy of then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.^[7]

Waldheim was re-elected in 1976 despite some opposition. During this time, Waldheim and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter both prepared written statements for inclusion on the Voyager Golden Records, now in deep space.^[8] In 1980 Waldheim flew to Iran in an attempt to negotiate the release of the American hostages held in Tehran, but Ayatollah Khomeini refused to see him; they were later relased through the efforts of incoming US President Ronald Reagan.^[9] While in Tehran, it was announced that an attempt on Waldheim's life had been foiled. Near the end of his tenure as Secretary-General, Waldheim and Paul McCartney also organized a series of concerts for the People of Kampuchea to help Cambodia recover from the damage done by Pol Pot.^[10]

In 1981, his bid for a third term was blocked by a veto by China, and he was succeeded by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru.

Waldheim had unsuccessfully sought election as President of Austria in 1971, but his second attempt on June 8, 1986, proved successful.

1986 also marked the beginning of what became known as the "Waldheim Affair". Before the presidential elections, Alfred Worm, in the Austrian weekly news magazine Profil, revealed that there had been several omissions about Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945 in Waldheim's recently-published autobiography. A short time later, it was proposed by the World Jewish Congress that that Waldheim had lied about his service as an officer in the mounted corps of the SA, and his time as an ordnance officer in Saloniki, Greece, from 1942 to 1943. Waldheim had publicly stated that he was wounded and had spent the last years of the war in Austria, but pictures revealed him in 1943 in Yugoslavia and 1944 in Greece.^[11] Speculation grew, and Waldheim was accused of being either involved, or complicit, in war crimes.

Throughout his term as President (1986-1992), Waldheim and his wife Elisabeth were deemed personae non gratae by many countries. In 1987, they were put on a watch list of persons banned from entering the United States. In six years Waldheim visited the Middle East , the Vatican as well as some communist states, but did not visit any Western European states or the United States.

Because of the ongoing international controversy, the Austrian government decided to appoint an international committee of historians to examine Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945. Their report cited evidence of Waldheim's knowledge about preparation for war crimes but denied any personal involvement in those crimes. According to a controversial book by author Eli Rosenbaum, the Austrian government and a number of media outlets vigorously opposed the allegations both before and after the release of the report.^[12]

During the controversy, Waldheim was defended by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal,^[13] who was severely criticized.^[6] Wiesenthal responded to his critics in a letter to The Forward, published October 15, 1993:

I am not familiar with the new book by Eli Rosenbaum and William Hoffer, but friends who have read it tell me that it is filled with hate and consists almost entirely of an attack on me. ...
And now a Jew, Eli Rosenbaum, has written a book about me -- or rather against me. One wonders why this has appeared on the market just now -- seven years after the Waldheim affair. "The people from the World Jewish Congress, who were so committed to the Waldheim case, find it difficult to accept the results of the international commission of historians. This commission, which was formed at my instigation in Vienna, had come to the conclusion that Mr. Waldheim knew about the wartime crimes in the Balkans but that he was not personally involved in these. A similar judgment was pronounced by a committee that examined the documents about Mr. Waldheim on Thames Television in London. The committee included some of the most respected jurists; the former director of the Office of Special Investigations, Alan Ryan, functioned as prosecutor. This group, too, concluded that there is no 'case' against Mr. Waldheim.
As I said, I have not yet read the book by Messrs. Rosenbaum and Hoffer, but I can be sure already that the neo-Nazis and all the Holocaust deniers will be overjoyed by its attacks against me.

In 1992 Waldheim was made an honorary member of K.H.V. Welfia Klosterneuburg, a Roman Catholic student fraternity that is a part of the Austrian Cartellverband (ÖCV). In 1994, Pope John Paul II awarded Waldheim a knighthood in the Order of Pius IX and his wife a papal honor. ^[14]

• International Commission of Historians (1993). The Waldheim Report. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, University of Copenhagen. pp. 224 p. ISBN 87-7289-206-4.
• Waldheim, Kurt (1985). In the eye of the storm: the memoirs of Kurt Waldheim. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-78678-4.

• Waldheim is the subject of Lou Reed's song "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim" from the album New York, in which he is criticized as a racist along with Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Pope John Paul II, characterizing Jackson's pleas for common ground as hypocritical.^[15]

• W. G. Sebald's novel The Rings of Saturn (1995; English trans., 1998) refers to Waldheim, though not by name.^[16]

• As a much-heralded invited guest on Dame Edna Everage's talk show The Dame Edna Experience, a dignified "Kurt Waldheim" began a grand entrance, except that halfway down the staircase he abruptly fell through a hidden chute and disappeared: the band's fanfare stopped as Dame Edna explained she had decided at the last minute to "abort" Dr. Waldheim's appearance because it would have been "too political." The episode aired 12 September 1987.

• A running segment on the Howard Stern radio show is called Guess Who's The Jew and features Fred Norris portraying a Nazi Kurt Waldheim Jr.^[17]

• Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, in which Germany won the Second World War, a "Kurt Haldweim" is the third Führer of Germany.

• Official U.N.S.G. Biography
• Austria and Nazism: Owning Up to the Past (A BBC Report)
• The Waldheim Report: International Commission of Historians at Google Books

v t e Secretaries-General of the League of Nations and the United Nations
League of Nations (1919–1945)	Eric Drummond (United Kingdom) Joseph Avenol (France) Seán Lester (Ireland)
United Nations (since 1945)	Gladwyn Jebb1 (United Kingdom) Trygve Lie (Norway) Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden) U Thant (Burma) Kurt Waldheim (Austria) Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (Peru) Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt) Kofi Annan (Ghana) Ban Ki-moon (South Korea) António Guterres (Portugal)
Related	Leaders of the League of Nations United Nations Secretariat Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations UN Secretary General memoirs
1 Provisional Secretary-General prior to the election of Trygve Lie.

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