Arnold never repudiated ex-Nazi politician

A little refresher course may be in order. Kurt Waldheim, a widely esteemed former secretary general of the United Nations, was running for president of Austria in March 1986 when it came to light that he had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II. Waldheim had always maintained that he had served in the Wehrmacht only briefly and that after being wounded early in the war, he had returned to Vienna to attend law school. In fact, Waldheim had resumed military service after recuperating from his injury and had been an intelligence officer in Germany's Army Group E when it committed mass murder in the Kozara region of western Bosnia. (Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmacht's "honor list" of those responsible for the atrocity.) In 1944, Waldheim had reviewed and approved a packet of anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Russian lines, one of which ended, "enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over." After the war, Waldheim was wanted for war crimes by the War Crimes Commission of the United Nations, the very organization he would later head. None of these revelations prevented Waldheim from winning the Austrian election, but after he became president, the U.S. Justice Department put Waldheim on its watch list denying entry to "any foreign national who assisted or otherwise participated in activities amounting to persecution during World War II." The international community largely shunned Waldheim, and he didn't run for re-election. (This information comes from the1992 book Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, by Eli M. Rosenbaum and William Hoffer.)


One month after these revelations began to splash across the front pages of newspapers worldwide, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver exchanged wedding vows at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass. Schwarzenegger, a native of Austria, had invited Waldheim to the wedding, which of course can't be held against him because the invitations surely went out well before the war crimes story broke. (Schwarzenegger, who held dual citizenship in Austria and the United States, had also endorsed Waldheim.) Waldheim didn't attend, but he sent a gift—a statue of Arnold, in lederhosen, bearing off Maria, who wore a dirndl.


http://slate.msn.com/id/2086742/

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