Former U.N. Chief, Austrian leader Kurt Waldheim, dies

While Rick is traveling in New York City with his daughter's high school orchestra, HolyCoast Dad is pitch hitting.

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The reputation of Kurt Waldheim, 88, was dimished by disclosures he hid his Nazi past. Born in 1918, Waldheim was head of the United Nations in the 1970s before becoming Austrian president, a largely ceremonial role.

Waldheim admitted concealing his service with Hitler's army in the Balkans but always denied knowing of Nazi war crimes committed there. "Kurt Waldheim left this world with a huge question mark about his past and his activities during World War II, said Ephraim Zuroff, Israeli director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. He was in a position to know about Holocaust crimes and didn't do anything to stop them, and loyally served the Nazi regime."

A significant number of top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, were Austrian.

Waldheim said the intelligence services of major powers knew about his past when he was U.N. leader from 1972 to 1981 but that his economy with the truth was in retrospect "a mistake".

During Austria's 1986 presidential election, a news magazine published his old military registration card with stamps suggesting he had belonged to the Nazi brownshirts, Hitler's paramilitary street force, before World War II. The magazine said it had also found evidence Waldheim had service in the Balkans in 1942-1945, much of this under a general who was executed for war crimes in 1947.

Waldheim denied knowing that thousands of Greek Jews were deported from the port of Thessaloniki, just four miles from where he was based for many months.

Former World Jewish Congress executive director Elan Steinberg, a key player in the campaign against Waldheim that ended with his being barred from the United States, said, "The sad thing is that he could not confront the truth even at the end. Now he is before God and cannot lie."

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I have viewed many programs about the war in Europe and most of the high ranked officers stated "they were just following orders". I imagine Waldheim would be in that group. It was follow orders or be killed by your own military machine. He took the easy way out. In Hogan's Heroes (fictional) the German guard always said "I see nothing - I know nothing"!

Why was he given a high office by the U.N. members? Kind of confirms the fact that this is a useless world organization, doesn't it? The Register article had a picture taken May 22, 1943, of Waldheim in a German officer's uniform in Yugoslavia. Can't deny that!