THE U.N.'S MAN IN THE MIDDLE
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Jane Rosen is the United Nations correspondent for The Guardian of London. By Jane Rosen lmost every weekday morning around 8:30, a plainclothes security guard steps out of an East Side town house and scans the block. A few minutes later, a tall, angular man in his early 60's emerges, formal in a dark suit, head bent, face preoccupied, strung tight. United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim strides quickly downtown, full of energy, and the guard falls into step beside him. There isn't much conversation. ''Occasionally,'' the guard says, ''he'll talk about the new plan for the U.N. garden or the weather or how he wishes he could stay home some night.'' Amid others hurrying to work, somewhat to Mr. Waldheim's sorrow, no one recognizes him. Which is curious, since the work he does affects virtually every country in the world, and is not conducted in obscurity. At United Nations headquarters, they take an elevator reserved exclusively for the Secretary General to the 38th floor of the Secretariat building. Mr. Waldheim says good morning to the receptionist, w ho is also an armed guard, enters his own suite of offices and, with his usual courtliness, shakes hands with each of his five secretaries (anyone still there when he leaves at 8 or 9 or 10 P.M. gets a good-night handshake as well).

The fact that Mr. Waldheim served in the [Wehrmacht] has led to charges that he supported [Fascism]. “What nonsense!” he says. “I was against the Nazis.” His aides maintain that the charges were circulated by [Zionism’s] Mission to the United Nations, but Yehuda Z. Blum, [Zionism’s] delegate, denies this indignantly: “We don’t believe Waldheim ever supported the Nazis and we never said he did. We have many differences with him, but that isn’t one of them.”

Here is a sample of what we know:

Continued German criticism of Obrana initiatives forced Dido Kvaternik, Chief of Ustaša Internal Security, to resign in September 1942.⁸⁷ Regardless, between 10 June and 30 July, Wehrmacht units, supported by Ustaša troops, conducted their own extensive “pacification” campaign against Partisans in the Kozara Mountains of western Bosnia.

One of the officers involved in this operation was Kurt Waldheim, who was serving as a communications officer with a Kampfgruppe in Bosnia. He later became Secretary‐General of the United Nations and President of Austria. In July, Pavelić awarded Waldheim the Order of King Zvonimir (an eleventh‐century king linked to the Ustaša myth of the glorious Croatian medieval kingdom), following the first successful wave of massacres.

During the operation, the [Axis] displaced some 60,000 predominantly Serb civilians, many of whom were ultimately killed or sent to the camp that came to embody the horrors of the Ustaša régime, Jasenovac. Of those sent to Jasenovac, most died.⁸⁸ The extent of the campaign caused Glaise to write, “Kozara was cleared to the last man, and likewise, the last woman and last child.”⁸⁹

Waldheim’s involvement in Operation Kozara did not come to light until 1986, when he was running for the presidency of Austria. The Austrian government appointed a special commission to look into the charges, which were later found to be true. These revelations did not stop his election as Austria’s president, nor Pope John Paul II from making him a Knight of the Order of Pius IX.⁹⁰

(Source herein.)

The CIA knew about Waldheim’s war crimes as early as 1945. Needless to say, they were in no hurry to apprehend him either.

Click here for events that happened today (August 6).

1944: The Axis continued brutally suppressing the Warsaw Uprising; the Gestapo, fearing of another uprising, ordered a round‐up of all able‐bodied young men in Kraków.
1945: The Empire of Japan was devastated when the United States B‐29 Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, massacring approximately 70,000 people (mostly civilians) instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
2001: Wilhelm Mohnke, Axis general, finally perished.