Today, July 8, marks 40 years since Kurt Waldheim — a man already known to have concealed his inhuman Nazi wartime crimes against civilians — was inaugurated as president of Austria.
Waldheim had served as the United Nations secretary general from 1972 to 1981, and today his portrait hangs alongside those of the other secretaries general at UN headquarters. By allowing this honor the United Nations continues to disgrace itself as an institution with a long, ugly history of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.
I will never forget that day as Waldheim was paraded through the streets, I stood with a group of activists — among them the great Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld and the revered Catholic leaders Father David Bossman of Seton Hall and Sister Rose Thering, of blessed memory. Wearing replicas of concentration camp prison uniforms, we called: “Shame for electing a Nazi! The voice of moral conscience will follow you wherever you go.”
The crowd answered with cries of hatred. “Speak German, you idiot!” one man yelled. Others shouted, “Hang them from the lamppost!” The Associated Press reported that protesters hurled antisemitic curses rarely heard in public since the Hitler era.
As Sister Rose left Vienna — no doubt because of her protest — she suffered a humiliation of unbelievable magnitude. Security officials at the airport stopped her and ordered her into a curtained booth, where she was forced to strip naked and submit to a body search. The next day, the story ran on the front page of the New York Post.
Sister Rose described her ordeal in detail, then added a remark that reflected her extraordinary spiritual depth: she said the experience had given her a small taste of what Jews felt when they were stripped before being sent to the gas chambers.
Outraged by what unfolded, Beate and I made a promise: wherever Waldheim appeared in the Free World, we would be there to protest. And so it was.
We traveled to the Vatican when Pope John Paul II met with him, tragically praising him as “dedicated to securing peace.” We went to Turkey when he met with President Kenan Evren, where, when peacefully raising our signs, we were brutally arrested. In Salzburg, when Waldheim met Czech President Vaclav Havel, Austrian police dragged us into a side room and beat us.
These protests, and the protests of others, helped isolate Waldheim from the international community. When his own party’s leadership abandoned him, Waldheim chose not to seek a second term as he was dragging down Austria’s standing in the world.
American and international Jewish organizations, especially the World Jewish Congress, played a critical role in reminding Austria supporting Waldheim carried a price. The Reagan administration deserves credit for placing Waldheim on its watch list of suspected war criminals and banning him from entering the U.S. The Bush administration deserves credit for its largely successful campaign to keep him isolated internationally.
Not so the United Nations. Four decades after that shameful inauguration, Waldheim’s portrait still hangs in a place of honor at UN headquarters. Diplomats and schoolchildren alike walk past the image of a man whose wartime record was defined by concealment and complicity in atrocities against civilians, with no plaque, no asterisk, no acknowledgment at all.
An institution that claims to stand for human rights has no business memorializing a man complicit in mass murder — and every day it does so is another day the UN tells the world exactly how little its human-rights rhetoric is worth.
The United Nations must act now. Take Waldheim’s portrait down.
Weiss is founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale – the Bayit. His new book, “Defending Holocaust Memory,” is scheduled for publication next year.