THE WALDHEIM STORY
The press:
Paul Johnson on the unstudied
history of Austria's war guilt
THERE have been frequent complaints in this column about the decline in the stan- dards of foreign news coverage in the British press. This is partly due to the collapse of our state education system, partly to the greed of the print unions. One of the reasons I am so strongly in favour of the revolution now sweeping through Brit- ish national newspapers is that, by trans- forming the economics of newspaper pub- lishing and breaking the blackmail power of the unions, it will make more money available to cover the world adequately. We shall see. Meanwhile, the poverty- stricken manner in which most British national newspapers have handled the Kurt Waldheim story is an example of what I mean. A generation ago, correspondents like Terence Prittie of the Manchester Guardian and Colin Lawson of the Daily Express would have led the world in getting at the facts. Nowadays it is the Americans, with their big foreign news networks, who make the running.
There is now no doubt that Waldheim lied about his wartime service. He con- tinues to prevaricate when he says that he only recently learned of the deportation of Jews from Salonika to the death camps. As an intelligence officer of Army Group E, which had its headquarters near Salonika, he must have known. The notion that the SS murdered six million Jews without the army's knowledge is nonsense. Its active cooperation was required, especially in occupied countries like Greece. Salonika had a large and famous Ladino-speaking Jewish community, one of the great curiosities of the Balkans. The first thing the German army did when it arrived there on 9 April was to close down the Jewish paper and seize a number of Jewish build- ings and institutions, including the Jewish hospital, for military purposes. In Decem- ber 1942, the ancient Jewish cemetery, dating back to at least the 15th century, was smashed up with all its historic tombs, and turned into a quarry. Thousands of Jews were rounded up by the army and used as forced labour on army projects. Jews had to wear the yellow star and place it on their shops and offices. They were forbidden to set foot on the streets after nightfall, use the phone or ride trams. They were constantly shot for breaking anti-Jewish laws. Elaborate steps were taken by the occupying authorities to strip them of every drachma they possessed. From 13 March to 17 August 1943 a total of 19 enormous trainloads, crammed to capacity, conveyed 43,850 Jews, 95 per cent of the community, from Salonika station to the Polish death camps.
It was Professor Robert E. Herzstein of the University of South Carolina who first discovered the facts about Waldheim's war service. As he pointed out in the New York Times, it was not difficult. After he had been hired by the World Jewish Congress in March, he spent only 11 days working in the German records collection in the Washington Archives. He discovered that Waldheim had not only held the intelli- gence job at Army Group E but had been responsible for 'special tasks', a euphem- ism, as Herzstein put it, for 'distasteful unwritten orders that were not to be attributed to the Germany army'. Officers in Waldheim's department 'were expected to work with relevant SS and Gestapo authorities'. Herzstein added: 'If I found all this in little over a week, what did I fail to discover?'
The British press gradually got on to the Waldheim story. Last Saturday the Times carried an interview by Frank Johnson with Waldheim in which he claimed he was not actually in Salonika 'during the main part of the deportations'. But his exact move- ments and chronology during 1943 were not made clear. In any case it is obvious that Army Group E's intelligence depart- ment knew what was going on. Last Sun- day the Observer carried an excellent piece by Neil Ascherson describing what has so far been discovered about Waldheim's `secret war', as the paper put it. But clearly there is a lot more digging to do, especially about how he got clearance to become UN Secretary-General. Herzstein suggests the answer may lie in his connections with Western agencies in the post-war period. British papers also carried articles touching on Austrian reactions to the Waldheim affair, seen in Vienna as a `Jewish witch-hunt'. Some of them discus- sed the delicate matter of Austrian anti- semitism. But none I have seen explored the full measure of Austria's collaboration in Hitler's 'Final Solution'. It is all admir- ably summarised in the section of Howard Sachar's book, Diaspora, dealing with Au- stria. In 1936, out of a total population of only seven million, no fewer than 537,000 Austrians were registered Nazis. Not only Hitler himself but the boss of the Gestapo, Kaltenbrunner, and the chief administrator of the whole extermination programme, Eichmann, were Austrians. Austria formed only eight per cent of Hitler s expanded Reich, but one-third of all the people working in the SS extermination programme were Austrians. Of the six big Polish death camps, four — Sobibor, Maidanek, Belzek and Treblinka — were commanded by Austrians. In fact of the six million Jews who were murdered, almost half were done in by Austrians. That is an appalling record, worse than Germany's in many ways. But because the Allies, for complicated reasons of their own, declare°, Austria to be 'the first free nation to fall victim of Hitlerite aggression', it was not required to make restitution. The west Germans, to do them justice, have ack- nowledged their war guilt. They prose- cuted thousands of war criminals, the! made a serious effort to tell the truth about the Hitler period in their history and theY paid damages. By the end of the century their government will have handed out over $30 billion to Jewish war victims. The Austrians, by contrast, have done virtuallY nothing. It is because the Austrians have never faced the truth about their war-time record that Waldheim has been able to,. conceal his, and will probably get himself elected their President. It is a strange; rather gruesome story, but not one 0u,r1. newspapers have effectively covered. lit would have been a different matter, 1 suppose, if he'd been related to the Royal Family.
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