Pope Hails Waldheim but Touches on His Nazi Past : Police Bar Protesters at Vatican

VATICAN CITY —  While police kept shouting protesters from approaching the Vatican, Pope John Paul II hailed President Kurt Waldheim of Austria as a peacemaker at a controversial audience that also touched on Waldheim’s World War II Nazi links.

About 100 people protesting the pontiff’s meeting with a man accused of complicity in Nazi war crimes shouted “Assassin!” and “Shame!” as Waldheim’s motorcade crossed cobblestoned St. Peter’s Square. One group held up a makeshift gallows.

The square was closed to tourists as part of tight security around the meeting, which ended Waldheim’s diplomatic isolation since he became president of Austria last July.

After the 35-minute private audience, which had been denounced in advance by Jewish leaders in Israel, the United States and elsewhere, Waldheim said he and the Pope touched on the controversy over Waldheim’s Nazi past.

Pope Aware of Problems

“Yes, I talked with Pope John Paul II this morning about the accusations leveled against me, about what I’m alleged to have done during the war, but in a marginal way,” Waldheim said.

“The Pope knew from the start the problems that the visit might raise, but he wished it to take place nonetheless,” he added. Waldheim has denied any wrongdoing.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel said in Jerusalem that the meeting “caused us great anguish,” adding: “We might have expected better of the Vatican.”

In his speech during the audience, Waldheim said, “As a representative of a predominantly Catholic country, it was to me a special concern, indeed, a heartfelt wish, to pay my first official foreign visit to the head of the Holy Roman Church, to which I belong.”

Isolated by Allegations

Since his election, Waldheim had been isolated because of allegations he was involved in Nazi atrocities while serving in the German army in the Balkans during World War II.

The U.S. government has barred his entry into the United States, where he onced lived while serving as secretary general of the United Nations.

“All of your activities in international life, as a diplomat and a foreign minister for your country . . . were dedicated to safeguarding peace among peoples,” the Pope said in his public speech just outside the papal library after the private meeting.

Avi Weiss, a New York rabbi who led protests Wednesday and today at the Vatican, said he was “incensed” by the Pope’s praise of Waldheim’s tenure at the United Nations.

U.N. Tenure Criticized

“It was during his tenure that (PLO chief Yasser) Arafat came to the United Nations with a gun in his belt . . . and when more anti-Israel resolutions than ever were passed,” Weiss said.

Weiss said he was “terribly distressed” by the Pope’s “silence” in his public speech about the Waldheim controversy.

In his speech, Waldheim stressed the importance of nuclear disarmament, then called as well for “spiritual disarmament that leads to the reductions of preconceived enmity between peoples, races and religions.”

Helicopters circled in the cloudless sky over Vatican City, and Italian police and paramilitary police, joined by plainclothes security men, closed off streets lined with souvenir shops which lead to the Vatican.

Police kept protesters at least 50 yards from the wooden barricades which closed off St. Peter’s Square to all but a few priests on their way to work at the Vatican.

Some survivors of Nazi concentration camps sat on the curb near the police blockade and raised black signs with yellow letters with camp names such as Treblinka.