Article: Waldheim's sham - Austria's shame. (Kurt Waldheim) (editorial)

WALDHEIM'S SHAM-AUSTRIA'S SHAME

The private past of Kurt Waldheim, formerSecretary-General of the United Nations, is appropriately a public issue. Recently, it emerged that he covered up nearly three years of military service during 1942-45 in a German Army unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia and Greece.

Less clear is what was covered up. He was not ahero but, says Waldheim, neither was he a knave. "I was just a sort of clerk,' he told me in an interview published last week in this magazine. "To disobey was to be executed.' Like so many others, he obeyed. He seems unaware of the disconcerting parallels with many Nazis who asserted the same ...

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