Waldheim's Tito Connection
SELIC, MOMCILO
SILENCE IN BELGRADE Waldheim's Tito Connection BY MOMCILO SELIC GERHARD WALDHEIM, acting the dutiful son, came to the defense of his father Kurt in a June 6 Op-Ed article for the New York Times....
...This is little understood in the West, where a person may become an intelligence operative even if his political commitment is less than perfervid...
...And the only trump Waldheim could have had that would have prompted his Yugoslav adversaries to back off was some information highly unsavory to them—such as knowledge of the 1943 Nazi-Partisan negotiations...
...In these circumstances, an Oberleutnant was bound to be well acquainted not only with the general strategic picture in the Yugoslav War Zone but also with the tactical details of various ongoing undertakings...
...Again, Wald-heim's part in those parleys is unknown, yet with his expertise in "matters Yugoslav" he could hardly have been excluded from them...
...There is very little possibility that Oberleutnant Waldheim of German Military I ntelligence could have avoided interrogating prisoners and giving orders for their execution—duties that were an integral part of every Nazi "punitive and cleansing" action in the field...
...and military cooperation against the British "imperialists," who wereex-pected to set up a Second Front on the Yugoslav Adriatic Coast...
...The details ofWaldheim'srolein Operation Schwarz can only be surmised...
...Through his aides, Tito conveyed to the Germans the following conditions for a cessation of hostilities: an immediate exchange of all prisoners of war...
...On one of those occasions, UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim was awarded a very high Yugoslav decoration, as he had been once before by the puppet government of Croatia after the genocidal campaign of 1942...
...Today Party historians, when deigning to acknowledge this episode, dismiss it as proof of Tito's "tactical genius...
...Concerning his father's World War II record in Yugoslavia, he wrote: " But the crucial point is that those years remain an explosive subject inside Yugoslavia, which in turn means that that the Yugoslavs are unlikely to publish the files on my father to explain why they never pursued the allegations...
...Both claims are untenable in the light of what is well-established about theworkings of the Third Reich...
...After all, one of the major Partisan claims to legitimacy was their supposedly uncompromising resistance of the enemy, in contrast with the Chetniks' alleged collaboration...
...Their presence, following the initial 1941 campaign of conquest, never exceeded some 10 Army divisions (100,000-120,000 men), and Nazi troops in Yugoslavia itself seldom numbered over 100,000...
...Their faces were bestial, belonging to a truly lower race...
...Captured German papers indicate that the German High Command in the Balkans agreed to Tito's conditions...
...Hitler himself, however, ordered the agreement annulled when he learned of the talks...
...Just how candid Kurt Waldheim has been with his son no one can know for sure...
...Then there is the question of exactly where Kurt Waldheim was at the end of the War...
...He is the ceremonial head of a staunchly neutral state that prides itself on being a champion of human rights...
...In fact, the Nazi-Partisan talks were kept secret from the Yugoslav people until the 1980s (by then the Tito-ists' legitimacy was, of course, no longer at issue...
...But a captain of the Yugoslav Military Intelligence, Milan Skero, insists on having seen him in General Alexander Lohr's entourage in northern Slovenia during the negotiations f or the surrender of the Germans in Yugoslavia...
...Savage as it was, Operation Weiss failed to completely neutralize the insurgents, largely because the participating Italian Occupation Forces were not sufficiently zealous...
...In the spring of 1943 the Nazis launched a campaign called Operation Weiss (Operation White...
...a non-belligerency pact between the German Forces and the Partisans (so the Partisans could, in Tito's words, "fight their principal enemy, the Chetniks...
...Although Kolendic, a Tito confidant (and one-time agent for the Soviet Secret Service, too), does not reveal precisely why this about-face occurred, enough circumstantial evidence has accumulated to permit a credible conjecture...
...Kurt Waldheim's name was third on the list of nine German officers decorated for valor in the Kozara Operation...
...The day after the Op-Ed piece appeared, the Times ran a dispatch from Belgrade reporting a related disclosure by Anton Kolendic, a former senior Yugoslav Intelligence official...
...German orders, probably signed at some stage by Waldheim himself, called for a total war against all natives, including civilians, because no Yugoslav in the region was trusted...
...Two irrefutable documents place Oberleutnant Waldheim in two definite places in Yugoslavia during two major anti-Partisan actions...
...or, as it is officially termed by the Yugoslavs, "The Fourth Enemy Offensive") against the two Yugoslav resistance movements— the Communist-led Partisans and the loyalist Chetniks...
...But something transpired during the extradition process that made the Yugoslavs abandon the entire effort...
...In a single strike, Wehrmacht and SS troops slaughtered 5,000 wounded in the Partisan Central Military Hospital...
...His medal was garnished with two Oak Leaves, a sign of special distinction...
...Further, it must be noted that Wald-heim's rank of Oberleutnant in the Intelligence Service was not so lowly as he maintains...
...According to Kolendic, the Yugoslavs attempted to extradite Waldheim from Austria in 1947 in order to prosecute him for alleged war crimes, and the Soviets were fully informed of all aspects of the matter...
...The Abwehr command covering the Yugoslav front could not have been very substantial, therefore, and probably comprised no more than 20-30 officers, along with a corresponding number of noncoms and privates...
...the Chetniks were scattered into northern Montenegro and southwestern Bosnia...
...One is a list of recipients of King Zvonimir's Medal, awarded by the government of the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia to German officers for their part in the " Kozara Operation" in the spring and summer of 1942...
...or "The Fifth Enemy Offensive," to use the official Yugoslav parlance) in the summer of 1943...
...Granted, the Oberleutnant's activities were well-known to the Soviets via their Yugoslav surrogates, and it appears increasingly likely that the Western powers were not wholly unaware of them...
...It seemed to us as if we were present at the instant of the forming of the primal human horde, with men rushing us in human waves, intent on self-destruction, and mindless of all fear...
...His presence in this snapshot, as we shall see, would appear to answer the question of why Kurt Waldheim has enj oyed seeming immunity from prosecution by the Yugoslavs, who have otherwise been so diligent in bringing war criminals to justice...
...Kurt Waldheim's smile, thin-lipped and knowing, today appears in a new set of photographs—the official portraits of the President of the Republic of Austria...
...Still, the Partisan losses were so severe that Tito sent his three top aides, Milo-van Djilas, Koca Popovic and Vlatko Velebit, to meet with the Germans about a possible cease fire...
...The same was true in the Soviet military: Commissars could overrule decisions made by their commanding officers, despite the latters' greater rank...
...But why neither the Soviets nor the Allies chose to prosecute Waldheim is a separate question altogether that deserves its own investigation...
...In this context, his son Gerhard's words on the Op-Ed page of the Times take on fuller meaning—confirming, even if inadvertently, more than was intended...
...and an Abwehr Oberleutnant, being by the nature of his service a political officer as well, had the authority to command even Regular Army colonels in the field...
...The former Abwehr Oberleutnant has ample cause for satisfaction, considering the number of people he has numbed with his wiles...
...And it is not hard to appreciate how revelations concerning Partisan attempts at accommodation with the Nazis would have been political dynamite after the War, in the Yugoslavia of 1947...
...On three occasions during the spring of 1943, the Partisan triumvirate held talks in Sarajevo and in Zagreb, capital of the Nazi-controlled Independent State of Croatia, with Wehrmacht representatives...
...At the minimum, the career of Kurt Waldheim, like that of another controversial figure, Marshal Josip BrozTito, has demonstrated that few things in this world succeed like success, regardless of how it is achieved...
...The ferocity of this attack, which lasted 50 days and cost some 60,000 Yugoslav lives, was described by the Nazi War correspondent Kurt Neher: "And then came the most horrifying part of all, that made everyone's blood run cold: A woman started screaming hard and long and hundreds took up her call: men, women and children threw themselves with beastly intensity upon our lines...
...To place both 1943 campaigns in perspective, it might be observed that by comparison the 1944 Nazi maneuvers against the Partisans in Macedonia (near Kocani and Stip), in which researchers of the World Jewish Congress have implicated Waldheim, were relatively modest...
...It is highly probable that Oberleutnant Waldheim—whose role in Operation Weiss could at the minimum not have been very different from the one he was decorated for at Zamora—knew of the negotiations with the Partisans...
...In any event, the Balkan War Zone, while extremely important for the Yugoslavs and other Balkan peoples, was a relatively minor region for the Germans...
...It was during this follow-up campaign that he was photographed as he stood with Colonel Herbert Macholz, General Artur Phleps, commander of the notorious 7 th Waf-fen-SS Division, and General Escola Roncagli of the Royal Italian Army...
...Italics mine...
...Oberleutnant was the highest military level below captain (the rank of the officer in charge of Wehrmacht operations in Serbia, for example...
...Having been lulled by the talks with the Germans, Tito lost over half his effective fighters and was himself wounded...
...Next came Waldheim's involvement in Operation Schwarz (Operation Black...
...No one could become an officer in the .4bwehr without being a fervent, tried and trusted National Socialist...
...Operation Schwarz was conducted by some 120,000 German, Italian, Croatian, Moslem, and Bulgarian troops against roughly 19,000 Partisans and an approximately equal number of Chetniks...
...He now claims he was in Trieste when the hostilities officially ceased...
...Be that as it may, Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim was finally sought for war crimes by the Yugoslav government on the basis of evidence contained in a file whose validity was accepted by the UN War Crimes Commission...
...What is apparent from the above excerpt, however, is that Gerhard knows, or at least suspects, the actual reasons behind the Belgrade authorities' reluctance to press the war crimes case of the man who has just been elected President of Austria...
...Interestingly, Tito —himself a former Austrian Master Sergeant—became Waldheim's close personal friend after the War, inviting him to his island retreat of Brioni several times...
...To begin with, it is necessary to explore Kurt Waldheim's background in the&H'e/2/-(Intelligence Service) of the Wehrmacht...
...It was highly successful from the German point of view...
...They resulted, incidentally, in very harsh terms for the surrendering Germans, incomparably worse than those they would have been granted had they reached Austria and capitulated to the Allies...
...The other document that places OberleutnantWaldheim in a definite place in wartime Yugoslavia is the infamous photograph of him taken at the Podgorica Airport in the summer of 1943...
...In his recent response to the charges raised by the World Jewish Congress, he insisted on two things: First, he was not a Nazi, and second, he was merely a small cog in the German War machine...
...In that respect, Nazi Germany was no different from other totalitarian countries like the USSR, and later Yugoslavia, who allowed only "the best and the brightest" of the Party cadre to occupy such posts...
Vol. 69 • June 1986 • No. 9
