WALDHEIM SAYS HIS PAST WAS MISREPRESENTED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000503980026-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 17, 2012
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: March 6, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/17: CIA-RDP90-00965R000503980026-2
ARTICLE ;?;FFNEW YORK TIMES
ON PAGE 6 March 1986
Waldheim Says His Past Was Misrepresented
By JOHN T. McQUISTON
Kurt Waldheim, former Secretary
General of . the United Nations, said
yesterday that his affiliation with a
German Army command responsible
for the deportation of Greek Jews in
World War II was being misrepre-
sented to disrupt his campaign as an in-
dependent candidate for the presidency
of Austria.
"It is true that I served in the Ger-
man Army command in the Balkans,
but I never participated in any sort of
cruelties," he said in an interview on
the CBS morning news. "All I did was
to interpret between Italian and Ger-
man commanders."
His appearance was one of several he
made from his Vienna office in re-
sponse to a report in The New York
Times on Tuesday that he had served i
as an interpreter under Gggn. Alexander
Ldhr, head of a German command that
fought Yugoslav partisans and de-
ported Greek Jews from Salonika in
1942-43.
After the war, Yugoslavia executed
General Lohr in 1947 for war crimes.
The report in The Times was based
on documents found among German
military records and in the archives of
the Austrian Justice Ministry and For-
eign Ministry. They had been turned
over to The Times by the World Jewish
Congress and were independently cor-
roborated.
When Mr. Waldheim was asked on
the CBS News program why he had
kept the Yugoslav and Greek aspects of I
his German military service a secret
for so long, he said:
"Isn't that interesting? For 40 years
nobody cared about al this. The Aus-
trian intelli ence as well as probably
all international intelligences cneCKeQ
me carefully when became ecretary
IG General of the United Nations.
"Nobody found anything. And now,
because I am running for the presi-
dency in Austria, suddenly somebody
digs in and produces accusations which
are completely untrue."
In an interview with The New York
Times on Sunday, Mr. Waldheim said
he had not known until that moment
about mass deportations of Jews from
Salonika.
In Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal, the
hunter of Nazi fugitives, said he was
convinced Mr. Waldheim had not been
a member of the Nazi Party. However,
he questioned how Mr. Waldheim could
have been unaware of the deportations
from Salonika, a city of 80,000 Jews be-
tore the war.
In Greece, Hagen Fleischer, a Crete
University specialist on the deporta-
tions, said Mr. Waldheim "had nothing
to do with Greek Jewry." Professor
Fleischer told the Reuters news agency
that he knew the names of all the peo-
ple who played a significant part in
rounding up Jews in Salonika and Mr.
Waldhein; was not among them.
According to Professor Fleischer,
Mr. Waldheim was used by the Ger-1
man forces as an Interpreter when Ital-I
ian partisans captured in Epirus werei
being interrogated about their contacts
with Greek guerrillas.
Mr. Waldheim placed a call yester-
day to Edgar M. Bronfman, president
of the World Jewish Congress. Mr.
Bronfman was absent, and the call was
taken by Israel Singer, the organiza-
tion's secretary general.
Mr. Singer later said that Mr. Wald-
heim had denied being involved "in the
tortures of Yugoslavs or deportation of
Jews."
Mr. Singer said the disclosures about
Mr. Waldheim were not timed to coin-
cide with the Austrian election cam-
paign, in which Mr. Waldheim is being
opposed by the governing Socialists.
"There has been a rumor mill on him
for years and we just got around tol1,
sending our legal counsel to Austria to
take a look around," he said. "It had
nothing to do with the Austrian elec-
tions."
A spokesman for Mr. Waldheim said
he had been misquoted in the account
of an interview published in the The
Times on Tuesday or had been the vic+
tim of a faulty translation.
Warren Hoge, foreign editor of The
Times, said that all the quotations in
the article had been verified on a tape
recording of the interview, which was
held in Vienna on Sunday. The author
of the article, John Tagliabue, con-
ducted the interview in German, a lan-
guage in which he is fluent.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/17: CIA-RDP90-00965R000503980026-2