Waldheim’s Past Is Present

“One’s past,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is what one is. It is the only thing by which people should be judged.” Judgment of a kind has now caught up with Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria, for 10 years until 1982 secretary general of the United Nations, and for three years in the 1940s--years that he long lied about and tried to obscure--an intelligence officer in the German army of occupation in the Balkans. It was during this period, an abundance of evidence shows, that Waldheim participated in the persecution of Greek and Yugoslav civilians and Allied prisoners. Waldheim, in sum, was engaged in war crimes, and for that reason he has now been barred from entering the United States for other than official visits to the United Nations or Washington in his capacity as head of state.

The action against a head of state is unprecedented. It is sanctioned by a law aimed at excluding anyone who under Nazi direction “ordered, initiated, assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin or political opinion.” The law is a more recent addition to the odious McCarran-Walter Act of the 1950s, whose sweeping Red-baiting provisions have been shamefully used, up to this very day, to exclude people whose political opinions or reputations have offended various Administrations. Much-needed legislation to greatly restrict the McCarran-Walter Act has been introduced by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.); it would not, though, tinker with the anti-Nazi provisions.

A cynic, or a realist, might note that the Justice Department, a highly political body in this Administration, has by this act and the deporting of Carl Linnas to the Soviet Union atoned in part for President Reagan’s grossly insensitive appearance at Bitburg in 1985, and at little practical cost. Austria is not a global powerhouse, and who ever thought that Waldheim would endure the obloquy of venturing here in any private capacity? But, whatever the motives, the symbol of the act is important, and richly deserved.

The record shows that Waldheim, who for years claimed that he had been discharged from the German army in 1942 because of war wounds, in fact served in that army for three more years on the staff of a man later executed for war crimes. During this time, the Justice Department found, Waldheim took part in the mass deportation of Jews and others from Greece and Yugoslavia to Nazi death camps; in the transfer of civilian prisoners to slave-labor camps; in the transfer of Allied prisoners to the SS, which executed many of them, and in reprisal executions of hostages and other civilians. During this time Waldheim was neither the student in Austria that he long said he was nor the simple army interpreter that he subsequently claimed to be. He was instead an active participant in “persecutorial activities” that resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of people.

Kurt Waldheim maintains that his conscience is clear. So is the evidence about what he did and what he was, and so is the propriety of the American government’s action.