"Former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim denies war crimes accusations"

This is an unpublished story which I wrote for an in-class exercise from some old wire copy about war crimes accusations against former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim.  This is written in broadsheet style.

ON Wednesday in Austria, a panel of historians accused the Austrian President, Kurt Waldheim, of being involved in war crimes and helping to pave the way for Nazi atrocities during World War 2.

In a 202-page report, the historians claim that their findings disprove a number of statements that Waldheim – also the former Secretary-General of the United Nations – had made in earlier defences against the allegations.

On 16 March 1986, in the Yugoslavian daily newspaper, Večernje Novosti, Waldheim declared: “I swear by all that is most scared in this world that I did not know about the deportation of Greek Jews.”

Prior to this, Waldheim had already defended himself against specific accusations that he was a member of the Nazi students’ union or an equestrian group attached to the Nazi SA (Brownshirts) – a paramilitary organisation of the party.

“I was never a member of these organisations,” Waldheim stated in an interview with Austrian television on 4 March 1986.

In response, the report is said to state that that Waldheim was unquestionably a member of the SA group and that the document proves Kurt Waldheim’s membership of the Nazi student federation.

The panel’s findings also apparently include evidence to suggest that the specific army group in which Waldheim had served was involved in the deportation of Jews.

As part of the work by the International Historians’ Commission that carried out the investigation, Waldheim was supposedly asked whether it would have been possible to resist orders leading to war crimes.

In response to this, Waldheim is alleged to have described any such action as “suicide from the outset’’, which the historians counter in the report by stating that they had found no evidence of a soldier refusing to take part in the murder of civilians and being punished for doing so.

One of the panel’s members, Manfred Messerschmidt, declared that Kurt Waldheim fell into a “trap of his own making” with his earlier denials.