Kurt Josef Waldheim was an Austrian politician and diplomat.
34 Facts About Kurt Waldheim
2.
Kurt Waldheim was born in Sankt Andra-Wordern, near Vienna, on 21 December 1918.
3.
Kurt Waldheim was the eldest child of Walter Watzlawik, a schoolmaster of Czech origin, and his wife Josefine Petrasch.
4.
Consequently, following his graduation Kurt Waldheim volunteered for a 12-month term of enlistment in the Austrian Army, and was posted to the 1st Dragoon Regiment on his 18th birthday.
5.
Kurt Waldheim managed to continue his studies by working as a Latin and Greek tutor and borrowing funds from relatives.
6.
Kurt Waldheim applied for membership in the National Socialist German Students' League, a division of the Nazi Party.
7.
In early 1941, Kurt Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany, specifically to the Heer, and posted to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad leader.
8.
In 1986, Kurt Waldheim said that he had served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals against local Serb civilians or of massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia.
9.
Kurt Waldheim said that he had known about some of the things that had happened, and had been horrified, but could not see what else he could have done.
10.
Kurt Waldheim later stated that "he did not know about the murder of civilians there".
11.
Kurt Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmachts "honour list" of those responsible for the militarily successful operation.
12.
Kurt Waldheim denied that he knew war crimes were taking place in Bosnia at the height of the battles between the Nazis and Tito's partisans in 1943.
13.
In 1945, Kurt 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 Alexander Lohr.
14.
Kurt Waldheim served as First Secretary of the Legation in Paris from 1948, and in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Vienna from 1951 to 1956.
15.
Kurt Waldheim was supported by 11 votes, including the Soviet Union, and led the first two rounds of voting.
16.
Kurt Waldheim won an accidental victory in the third round of voting when those three permanent members failed to coordinate their vetoes and all abstained.
17.
Kurt Waldheim added that the secretary-general condemned any form of racial discrimination and genocide.
18.
Kurt Waldheim ran for a second term in the 1976 UN Secretary-General selection.
19.
However, China was still opposed to Kurt Waldheim and approached several Third World countries seeking challengers.
20.
Kurt Waldheim resoundingly defeated Echeverria in the first round of voting.
21.
In 1977, Kurt Waldheim recorded a greeting for the Voyager Golden Records, a pair of discs containing sounds and images representing the diversity of life and culture on Earth, which were launched into deep space on the Voyager spacecraft.
22.
Kurt Waldheim was the first Secretary-General to visit North Korea, in 1979.
23.
In 1980, Kurt 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.
24.
Kurt Waldheim ran for an unprecedented third full term as Secretary-General in the 1981 selection.
25.
However, Salim was vetoed by the United States, while Kurt Waldheim was vetoed by China.
26.
The events of 1981 established a two-term limit on the office, and no Secretary-General since Kurt Waldheim has run for a third term.
27.
Kurt Waldheim had unsuccessfully sought election as President of Austria in 1971, but his second attempt on 8 June 1986 proved successful.
28.
Kurt Waldheim had previously claimed to have received a medical discharge after being wounded in winter 1942.
29.
The 23 March 1986 public disclosure by the World Jewish Congress that the organization had unearthed the fact that the United Nations War Crimes Commission concluded after the war that Kurt Waldheim was implicated in Nazi mass murder and should be arrested arguably transformed the Kurt Waldheim affair into the most sensational of all post-war Nazi scandals.
30.
Kurt Waldheim called the allegations, which grew in magnitude in the ensuing months, "pure lies and malicious acts".
31.
The International Committee in February 1988 concluded that Kurt Waldheim had been "in close proximity to some Nazi atrocities, knew they were going on and made no attempt to stop them".
32.
On 27 April 1987, the United States Departments of Justice and of State announced that evidence amassed in an investigation conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations had established a prima facie case that Kurt Waldheim participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution during World War II and therefore that his entry into the United States was prohibited by federal statute.
33.
Additional allegations of participation in Nazi crimes, with citations to captured Nazi documents and other records, were leveled in a 1993 book by Eli Rosenbaum, the former US federal prosecutor who had directed the World Jewish Congress investigation that led to the New York Times initial exposure of Kurt Waldheim's hidden Nazi-era past in 1986.
34.
Kurt Waldheim died on 14 June 2007, at the age of 88 from heart failure.