http://www.msnbc.com/news/949666.asp?0cv=CB20Here’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.”
Waldheim didn’t attend, but he sent a gift — a statue of Arnold, in lederhosen, bearing off Maria, who wore a dirndl. Admiring it, Schwarzenegger offered a tribute that stunned the assemblage into shocked silence (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.