De Engelstalige Wikipedia geeft interessante informatie. Ik heb mij er nooit in verdiept dus wat nu waar is en wat niet, geen idee. Wel zij er foto's van Waldheim in het gezelschap van SS-Oberführer Arthur Phleps te zien is.
Citaat:
Military service
In early 1941 Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front where he served as a squad leader. Sometime in 1941 he was apparently wounded. According to his autobiography, he was given a medical discharge and returned to Vienna to pursue his doctoral studies in law, but later documents would come to light revealing that Waldheim's military service continued much later than 1941; by 1943 he was serving in the capacity of an ordnance officer in Army Group E under the direction of General Alexander Löhr, an Austrian who would be executed in 1946 as a war criminal for his roles in suppressing uprisings by Yugoslav partisan forces and arranging the deportations of 40,000 Thessaloniki Jews to Auschwitz.
Waldheim himself would eventually be stationed in Thessaloniki, where he reported as an Oberleutnant for counter-insurgency efforts (Feindaufklärung) to General Löhr[citations needed]. In 1986 Waldheim would say that he served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals enacted against civilians locally or of large-scale massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia, but this is contradicted by intelligence reports[citations needed] and eyewitness accounts affirming that he was present at staff meetings where such matters were routinely discussed.
Much historical interest has centered around Waldheim's role in Operation Kozara[citations needed], a particularly ferocious campaign against Tito's partisans in the summer of 1942, in which thousands of partisans and civilians died in battle and in the concentration camps as a result of so-called cleansing operations, in the aftermath of which corpses of civilian hostages were hung on makeshift wooden gallows positioned along the road from Kostajnica to Banja Luka. According to one post-war investigator, prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred yards of Walheim's office., and the Jasenovac concentration camp where prisoners endured the most horrific of tortures was just a few miles away. Yet decades later Waldheim would maintain "that he did not know about the murder of civilians there."
Waldheim's name appears on the Wehrmacht's "honor list" of those responsible for the miltarily successful operation, and from the Croatian side, Waldheim received a silver medal with an oak leaf cluster from the fascist Ustashi leader, Ante Pavelic.
Additionally, in 1944, Waldheim 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."
In 1945, Waldheim surrendered to British forces in Carinthia, at which point he said he had fled his command post within Army Group E, where he was serving with General Löhr, who was seeking a special deal with the British. After the war, Waldheim was wanted for war crimes by the War Crimes Commission of the United Nations, the very organization he would later head.
Questions were later raised about Waldheim's truthfulness as to his World War II service (see "The Waldheim Affair," below).