Simon Wiesenthal and Kurt Waldheim

Deborah Lipstadt summarizes a point I recently heard Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev make in a live appearance. It's from her review of Segev's biography, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (2010), Simon Wiesenthal and the Ethics of History Jewish Review of Books Winter 2011:

If there was anything in particular that prevented Simon Wiesenthal from becoming, after S.Y. Agnon, the second Jew from Buczacz to win a Nobel Prize, it was probably his relationship with Kurt Waldheim. Back in the 1960s, when he was Austria's foreign minister, Waldheim had helped Wiesenthal to defend himself against rumors spread by Communist bloc countries that he had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II.

Two decades later, after he had served as Secretary-General of the UN and was running for the presidency of Austria, Waldheim's actual Nazi past finally came to light. Grateful for his earlier support, Wiesenthal, who should have known better (and probably did), dismissed the case against Waldheim as mere "gossip" spread by his political adversaries. This landed him in a nasty public battle with the World Jewish Congress, which lobbied to have Waldheim labeled a war criminal, placed on the United States' Watch List, and banned from entering the country. In 1986, at the height of this scandal, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to fellow survivor Elie Wiesel. "It is reasonable to assume," writes Tom Segev in his new biography, "that Wiesenthal didn't get the prize" at the same time "because he was at the center of a raging controversy."

Lipstadt's wording seems to be a bit sloppy. Waldheim was never shown to have been a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) himself, although his wife was. She had to get a special Party waiver to have a Catholic wedding with Waldheim. It was convincingly shown that Waldheim had lied about his wartime service in the Wehrmacht. The direct and circumstantial evidence that he was involved is war crimes is persuasive.

But so far as I've ever seen demonstrated, he wasn't an actual NSDAP member. He was a member of an NSDAP-affiliated riding club. Which prompted his critics, including then-Chancellor Fred Sinowatz (1929–2008) of the Socialist Party (SPÖ), to say that Waldheim wasn't a Nazi, only his horse was.

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