http://www.msnbc.com/news/949666.asp?0si=-Schwarzenegger’s Nazi problem
Will his ties to Kurt Waldheim hurt his bid for governor?
By Timothy Noah SLATE.COM
Aug. 7 — Here’s a question Jay Leno forgot to ask Arnold Schwarzenegger when he announced his candidacy for governor of California on last night’s “Tonight Show”: “Will you renounce your support for Kurt Waldheim?”
A LITTLE REFRESHER course may be in order. Kurt Waldheim, a widely esteemed former secretary general of the United Nations, was running for president of Austria in March 1986 when it came to light that he had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II. Waldheim had always maintained that he had served in the Wehrmacht only briefly and that after being wounded early in the war, he had returned to Vienna to attend law school. In fact, Waldheim had resumed military service after recuperating from his injury and had been an intelligence officer in Germany’s Army Group E when it committed mass murder in the Kozara region of western Bosnia. (Waldheim’s name appears on the Wehrmacht’s “honor list” of those responsible for the atrocity.) In 1944, Waldheim had reviewed and approved a packet of anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Russian lines, one of which ended, “enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over.” After the war, Waldheim was wanted for war crimes by the War Crimes Commission of the United Nations, the very organization he would later head. ….(This information comes from the 1992 book Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, by Eli M. Rosenbaum and William Hoffer.)
WEDDING INVITE One month after these revelations began to splash across the front pages of newspapers worldwide, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver exchanged wedding vows at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport. Schwarzenegger, a native of Austria, had invited Waldheim to the wedding,…(this is reported in Arnold: The Unauthorized Biography, by Wendy Leigh): My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the U.N. controversy, but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt. Schwarzenegger’s name remained on Waldheim’s campaign posters. After Waldheim was elected, Schwarzenegger paid him a visit and was photographed with him. According to the New York Post’s “Page Six” gossip column, Schwarzenegger was seen sitting beside Waldheim as recently as 1998, when the two attended the second inauguration of Waldheim’s successor as president, Thomas Klestil.
<snip>Rather than confront his Waldheim problem head-on, Schwarzenegger has proclaimed his disgust for Nazism, raised money for education about the Holocaust, traveled to Israel (where he met with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin), and given generously to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which in 1997 bestowed on him its National Leadership Award. “He wants no truck with … Waldheim,” the Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Marvin Hier told the Jerusalem Post. “He probably did not have any clue as to the seriousness of the allegations against Waldheim at that time
. To suggest that Arnold’s an anti-Semite is preposterous. He’s done more to further the cause of Holocaust awareness than almost any other Hollywood star.” Clearly, though, that won’t be enough. If Schwarzenegger doesn’t renounce Waldheim in a highly public way, he can forget about ever becoming governor of California.
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Timothy Noah writes the “Chatterbox” column for Slate.