![]() If, however, he insulted me again in front of others, I would resign and would not hesitate to explain to the press, governments, and anyone else who was interested, why I had done so. After the meeting, I told him that, because he was the Secretary-General of the UN, I would never respond to his offensive remarks in front of other people. He was acutely nervous of governmental criticism or public disapproval.Īt one of our early meetings, on the dangerous situation in the Indian subcontinent, Waldheim was particularly rude, in front of a number of other people, to me and one of my colleagues. Waldheim had not yet understood the peculiar nature of his new job and routinely blamed his early mistakes on his subordinates, particularly those who had tried to prevent them. Ralph Bunche, who had occupied the post for nearly twenty years, had died three months earlier and had not been replaced, and I was running his office, so inevitably I saw a great deal of the new Secretary-General. I was also determined to try to carry on the tradition of international service created by Dag Hammarskjold and Ralph Bunche.Īt the time, the Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs was a key senior official in the UN Secretariat. I could, of course, have left in disgust, but the UN was my vocation and I had always felt that I worked for the institution rather than for some transient secretary-general. He evidently regarded me as a representative of the old order which, with his superior wisdom and expertise, he was going to sweep away. He was dismissive, even contemptuous, of his predecessors, an attitude that I was not prepared to accept in silence. Waldheim had little public standing except as an unmemorable foreign minister of Austria, but that did not prevent him, on arrival at the UN, from posing as a world statesman who would radically upgrade the UN and its Secretariat. Shown here, the UN chief visits an UNTSO patrol base in the vicinity of Saassa village, near the Golan Heights in southern Syria. Due to tensions and violence in the Middle East, Secretary-General Waldheim was a regular visitor to the region throughout his terms. Over the years, its functions changed, but its military observers have remained in the area, helping prevent isolated incidents from escalating into major conflicts. While we cannot escape our past, we can attempt to make sense of it.The UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) was established in 1948 – the world body’s first-ever peacekeeping operation – with the aim of monitoring a cessation of hostilities following the partition of Palestine. Even with their attempts to escape this past, their sons found themselves involved in it. During the presidential race in the mid-1980s, the Austrian Socialist party falsely accused him of being a former Nazi, an accusation that was pursued by a leading US Jewish organisation. During the war, he served in the Wehrmacht in Yugoslavia and afterward rose to Austrian’s foreign minister, head of the UN, and Austria’s president. Waldheim never joined the NSDAP nor any of its affiliated organisations. While he questioned his role before the end of the war, the follow-up Nuremberg trials judged him a Mitläufer and he never fully moved beyond what he had accepted as a young man. ![]() ![]() Petschauer joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) after his university studies and served as a SS-lieutenant in a relocation office in Northern Italy. Although he escaped immediate justice, a local guide in 1946 murdered him during his attempt to escape Italy’s South Tyrol for Latin America. ![]() Bast committed to the Nazi movement early on, joining the SS and Gestapo as soon as possible later during WWII, he commanded Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe. ![]() It also highlights briefly the transgenerational effects of such a past, even on persons who understand the process. Gerhard Bast, Erich Petschauer, and Kurt Waldheim and their different responses to National Socialism. ![]()
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