![]() Finally he said he could not understand what all the fuss was about. First he said he was not there, and then that he was but never knew what was going on. His offence was to lie, and when exposed for so doing, to persist in lying even as the truth about his war service emerged. Lack of moral courage never was a crime and cannot be required of anyone, especially in retrospect. Both the Ministry of Defence in London and Simon Wiesenthal, the implacable Austrian-Jewish Nazi hunter, confirmed there was no evidence that Waldheim had committed war crimes. Even if he initialled them without reading them, his pretence that he never knew was fatuous.īut no evidence was found that Waldheim had taken personal or active part in any war crime, despite massive searches in the archives of half a dozen countries. His initials are to be seen on reports about mass deportations of Jews from Greece to the death camps, the bloody suppression of partisans, the use of Italian troops as forced labour after Italy's surrender and the "special treatment" (summary execution) laid down for captured British commandos. ![]() Waldheim worked, inter alia, as a liaison officer-cum-interpreter to Italian army units stationed in the Balkans. The latter was commanded by General Alexander Lohr, butcher of the Balkans, who was tried, convicted of war crimes and executed by Yugoslavia in 1947. Investigators discovered that Waldheim joined the Wehrmacht (Austria was willingly annexed by the Third Reich in 1938) and served as a first lieutenant on the staff of General Stahl's "battlegroup West Bosnia" and/or that of Army Group E, of which it was part. ![]() Several governments, most notably the British Ministry of Defence, launched their own inquiries. ![]() The hunt for more facts was taken up by the World Jewish Congress and the international media. Waldheim wrote, for example, that he had been studying for his doctorate in international law in 19 when he had actually been serving in the Balkans. An Austrian magazine revealed that the autobiography had covered up facts about this part of his life, including lies not only by omission but also by distortion. But then an Austrian writer, researching something else, stumbled across papers in German military and Austrian ministerial archives referring to Waldheim's war service. An example from a news programme on the 25 March 1986 will illustrate the major claims and methodology.He announced his candidacy in November 1985, soon after publishing his memoirs, In The Eye Of The Storm - a more apposite title than he knew at the time. In a series of spontaneous, semi-public discussions (which retained what might be called a conditional anonymity), however, whatever hindrances or inhibitions which seem to have been present in the televised discussions all but vanished. During televised discussions, for example, the various forms of antisemitism were embedded in strategies of positive self-promotion and/or cultivation of one's image. The results of the analysis show that expressions of antisemitic prejudice as such abounded, but that the explicitness and directness of the prejudices expressed varied markedly according to context. For this analysis it was thus necessary to develop and apply a new methodology and new categories, which incorporated a discursive-historical approach, inter-disciplinary theory formation and the connexus of textlinguistic, psychological and historical conceptions. Of particular relevance for the analysis is the influence which contextual factors (such as setting, speaker(s), presence or absence of Jews, role of the moderator in televised discussions, prominence of the speakers, emotionality, discussion topics, etc.) may or may not have had. This paper examines the mechanisms for the constitution and transport of anti-Jewish prejudice in public and private discourse in contemporary Austria.
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