Waldheim ‘Inquiry’ Will Make TV History

The case against Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, hotly debated for two years, has been moved to the courtroom, a suitably somber mock courtroom in a British television studio.

Some of the participants in the war in the Balkans, one of the most savage and ruthless theaters of World War II, are now coming forward and giving details before the cameras of their possible encounters with the tall, gangling lieutenant, then in his mid-20s.

Against a backdrop of generalized British government disapproval of “trial by television,” Kurt Waldheim’s wartime role is being pieced together bit by bit. How much was really known of his activities as third-ranking intelligence officer in Greece?

Was he, like the army group in which he served, implicated in the murder of Yugoslav and Greek civilians and the deportation of Jews from Greece to the Auschwitz death camp?

On the witness stand is former South African commando Capt. Charles Bluett. Five black-robed judges sit riveted by the evidence he is giving. Bluett is not played by an actor. Nor are the jurists, all of whom have international reputations. They include Los Angeles-based Judge Shirley Hufstedler, former circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals. The project’s special consultant is Telford Taylor, former U.S. chief prosecution counsel at the Nuremberg trials.

For virtually the first time in the history of television, a sitting head of state is the subject of a form of “trial” without actually ever being charged with a crime.

Most of the proceedings are being kept tightly under wraps until “Waldheim--A Commission of Inquiry” debuts in the United States as an HBO Showcase presentation June 5 at 8 p.m. A $2.9-million co-production between Britain’s Thames Television and HBO, the inquiry--to be edited to 3 1/2 hours--also will be shown the same day on British television’s Channel 4.

Bluett describes a rough interrogation session in a Salonika prison in 1944. He has just survived a firing squad in which “the man next to me was hit and two others collapsed.”

The door to the interrogation cell opens, he says. The calculated beatings mercifully stop. “Someone walked in behind and I had no view of him at all. But when he spoke, he spoke in a soft voice and the chaps at the table immediately went silent,” Bluett recalls.

The voice had a civilized tone. In his peripheral vision, Bluett could tell the visitor was over 6 feet tall and in officer’s uniform. But the identity remained unclear.

The implication from the testimony is that the tall officer behind Bluett is Waldheim. He was supposedly running the Salonika prison at the time. But real proof of his presence in the interrogation cell that day appears to be unsubstantiated.

Bluett and more than 30 other witnesses--Wehrmacht officers who served with Waldheim, as well as Yugoslavs, Italians and Greeks who remember him from the war years--are testifying at this nine-day inquiry into Waldheim’s alleged complicity in war crimes. Twenty-five researchers spent several months in 19 countries seeking out and interrogating likely participants. Many have never before spoken publicly on the subject.

“I do not represent that you will find that his was the hand that held the smoking pistol,” concedes “prosecutor” Allan A. Ryan Jr. in his opening statement. “(But) war crimes were committed by those men whom Waldheim served and served with,” says the former U.S. Justice Department Nazi hunter. “I shall show to you that Kurt Waldheim did not make the coffee for these men, nor, as he has claimed, was he some junior clerk. . . . His acts facilitated their crimes.”

Although the evidence, taken bit by bit, “may seem suggestive rather than compelling,” when taken as a whole, it cannot help but lead to the conclusion that the case against Waldheim demands an answer, Ryan insists.

His real role in the TV proceedings is not “prosecutor” but “presenting counsel.” The words are specifically chosen because the Waldheim inquiry is not a “trial,” nor was it originally conceived as one. Nor does it have any official status. Waldheim, the “defendant,” is not present. The “court” cannot render a verdict of guilty or innocent.

“The result that the commission of inquiry will hand down, after hearing all the evidence, is akin to saying, should a trial now be held?” says Ryan. But, he points out, the judges do not have the legal authority to hold Waldheim for trial. “It’s a matter where the commission has got to listen to the evidence and reach a sort of threshold judgment as to whether Waldheim can be exonerated, or whether there is indeed serious evidence.”

Challenging much of the evidence in the proceedings is former British Atty. Gen. Lord Rawlinson of Ewell, who makes it clear at the outset that he is not representing Waldheim, nor, in fact, has he had any contact with him.

Detailing how a U.S. military tribunal has already acquitted two general chiefs-of-staff--”men who knew everything”--of war crimes in the Balkans, Rawlinson questions how, then, could “a second lieutenant who became a lieutenant, who never fired a shot, who never gave a command” be guilty of crimes against the laws of war.

“My country and all the countries represented by the distinguished jurists on the tribunal . . . none of our countries hold with a lynching. Maybe, and I stress the word maybe , that is what has been happening over past months; the lynching of a reputation.”

The man behind the Waldheim TV production is British producer Jack Saltman, who has made something of a specialty of producing and directing investigative TV programs. One of the first things he did, he says, was seek legal opinion on the legal foundation for making such a controversial program. For, although U.S. television has done mock trials of individuals, this case is unique in using a living person not legally charged with any crime.

Saltman says he found that any libel action could be successfully defended because of the quality of people taking part and the fact that no allegations are being made that are not challenged and tested.

Saltman says he approached Waldheim in Austria last summer to explain the project.

Waldheim acknowledged that the program might be the fairest ever done, Saltman said, but still opposed the idea in principle.

Waldheim, according to Saltman, “said something to the effect, nobody but the Austrian people can try me, and by electing me as president, they have in effect given their opinion. Were one to search for 100 years, there would be no evidence of my guilt in war crimes.”

Special consultant Taylor agrees it’s probably true that Austria is the only place where Waldheim could be tried. “But I think you would agree that the chances of that happening are very remote,” he adds.

A report by an international historians’ commission, appointed by the Austrian government, was submitted in February this year. Although it found no proof that Waldheim was guilty of war crimes, it found him guilty of “moral complicity.” Since then, the press has publicized a great many of the documents turned up by researchers and others.

“But the story needed to be carried further,” Taylor says. “Whilst historians have their uses, the story needed examination by lawyers: people trained in deciding what had happened. More needed also to be done in getting witnesses and examing and cross-examining them.”

In the TV inquiry, most of the footage is taken up by witnesses giving evidence. This is unlike the Nuremberg trials, where more than four-fifths of the evidence was through documentation only. “You wouldn’t have viewers standing by very long if the whole TV program consisted of lawyers getting up and reading documents,” Taylor notes.

So the TV inquiry format, with its emphasis on the integrity and reliability of witnesses, “was both a desirable thing from the standpoint of completing the story and a desirable thing from the standpoint of the medium that was going to be used,” says Taylor. Those who described it as the media dictating the message, however, were getting it wrong, he insists.

Taylor is quick to admit that Waldheim would not have been tried at Nuremberg. “We were after the bigwigs and he wasn’t a bigwig.” But he believes that Waldheim might well have been tried in Austria, or more likely Yugoslavia or Greece, if the revelations had come out earlier and had been linked with solid proof of Waldheim’s implication in actual atrocities.

“But there’s no solid proof,” says Taylor. “Maybe he was (implicated) but there’s no evidence of it now.

“I would be the first one to say there must be thousands of people still alive who were in the Balkans the same time as he was who know as much as he did. Why is he a cause celebre now? It’s because it’s plain that he was right down there in the hotbed, with war crimes on both sides. Then, without any inquiry or anything, he becomes head of the U.N. and then head of Austria. So people wonder why did he not put in his book that he’d been down there, unless there was some feeling of guilt on his part perhaps.”

Why such a prestigious group of people agreed to participate in this TV inquiry is unclear. Each has different reasons.

Saltman believes that the witnesses participated because the researchers who tracked them down were extremely knowledgeable people who behaved like “historians,” inspiring confidence and the promise of a fair inquiry. It certainly wasn’t the money, which amounted to just a “small allowance,” he says.

Former Secretary of Education Hufstedler defends the program for its ability to give an objective presentation of history.

Presiding Judge Frederick Lawton, formerly with the U.K. Court of Appeal, also offers reasons of “historical accuracy.”

The various allegations against Waldheim “have disturbed my sense of fairness,” he says.

“A man is not guilty of a war crime because he served alongside those who did commit war crimes. Nor is he guilty of a war crime if he knew that others were committing war crimes and did nothing to stop them. And still less should he be deemed to be a war criminal because many years later, when recalling his military service . . . he was inaccurate in his recollection and, sometimes, very economical in the truth.”

If facts are found which, had they been known in 1946, could fairly and reasonably have led to Waldheim being charged with a war crime, then Lawton says he is prepared to give an opinion about that. “But I’m not prepared to do anything more, nor are my colleagues.”

“But,” concluded Lawton, “it may be that at the end of the inquiry the person who will be most grateful for its setting up will be Dr. Waldheim.”