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Austria claims Waldheim's vindicated by a CIA report Reuters and DPA VIENNA - Austria said on Saturday that files released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency on Friday proved that former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim was not guilty of Nazi-era war crimes. Waldheim, who became Austrian president after leaving the United Nations, was barred from entering the United States in 1987 after allegations that he may have been involved in wartime Nazi atrocities while serving as a German intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War Two. In response to the declassification of the material, Waldheim urged Washington on Saturday to lift its ban on his entry to the United States. "It has now been proven that the allegations against the former president were unfounded and unjust, as was always stressed by Austria," Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in a statement. She said numerous investigations into Waldheim's wartime past by independent historians, lawyers and television stations in Britain and the United States had shown there was no evidence of any personal involvement by Waldheim in Nazi war crimes. On Friday the CIA made public 20 files it kept on Nazi leaders, such as Hitler, Heinrich Mueller and Adolf Eichmann, who were known or suspected to have committed crimes against humanity. The files were released in accordance with Washington's Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. But the U.S. Justice Department's Eli Rosenbaum, a member of the interagency group that worked with the CIA to release the documents, said on Friday that the papers cleared up only one thing about Waldheim. "He had not acted as an intelligence resource for the United States but may have been used by Soviet intelligence organizations," the former noted Nazi-hunter Rosenbaum said. Austria had complained to the U.S. State Department over the fact that files about Waldheim had been released alongside those relating to top Nazis. Ferrero-Waldner said this was inappropriate and unjustified. Waldheim has always protested his innocence and even some of his political opponents in Austria now believe he was treated unfairly, arguing that his main offense was to have tried to cover up the fact that he served as a young officer in Hitler's Wehrmacht. Ferrero-Waldner said U.S. officials had stated at a press conference on Friday that the files contained no evidence that Waldheim had been a CIA agent or informant or that he had been blackmailed by the former Soviet Union. |
