WALDHEIM RECORDED ORDER TO KILL PARTISANS
By ELAINE SCIOLINO, Special to the New York Times
Published: May 2, 1986
UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., May 1— As a first lieutenant in the German Army in World War II, Kurt Waldheim kept his army group's daybook, which recorded Hitler's order to kill captured partisans in Greece and send suspected resistance fighters to labor camps, according to German war documents.
The record, kept on a daily basis, was written by Mr. Waldheim from July 19 to Aug. 21, 1943, while he was assigned to the German General Staff liaison attached to the Italian 11th Army in northwest Greece, according to a cover index of the daybook that bears Mr. Waldheim's name.
These and other German war documents, found in the National Archives in Washington, reveal new details of Mr. Waldheim's wartime service in the Balkans from 1942 to 1945. Mr. Waldheim's war record has become an issue in his campaign for the presidential election in Austria on Sunday.
Although the documents have been in the public domain since at least the mid-1960's, it was only when it came to light that Mr. Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General, served in the Balkans that researchers investigated that part of his wartime service. Before that Mr. Waldheim had maintained in two memoirs and his official United Nations biography that he served on the Eastern front until he was wounded in 1941, then finished his law studies in Vienna.
Robert E. Herzstein, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, who found these documents, said they were useful in showing the extent to which Mr. Waldheim knew about atrocities committed against the partisans in the Balkans. Mr. Waldheim has admitted a distant knowledge of the atrocities, after the controversy over his war record erupted, but has denied active participation in them.
''According to a new Fuhrer order bandits captured in battle are to be shot,'' Mr. Waldheim wrote in the Aug. 8 entry. ''Others suspected of banditry, etc. are to be taken prisoner and sent to Germany for use in labor details.'' He added that ''specific instructions'' for the ''bandits'' were being sent to the First Mountain Division of the 11th Army. The Germans described the partisans and those suspected of aiding them as ''bandits.''
Mr. Waldheim based his daybook on messages that passed between units in his army group, according to Professor Herzstein. On Aug. 8, for example, he also wrote that the ''mopping-up operation'' for an area known as Parga would begin in two days.
According to one of these messages, which was marked ''top secret'' and relayed on Aug. 7 to the 11th Army headquarters from the First Mountain Division, Parga was identified as a partisan area to be ''combed most severely and the male population is to be shot and/ or seized in entirety and evacuated,'' in accordance with the Fuhrer order.
The message said the divison ''complied with the orders for mopping-up operations'' there, despite the objection of the Italian commanding officer to the rounding up of all able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 60.
This message and others on which the daybook was based were translated into English for use in the Nuremberg trials, according to the documents.
In the last two months, after being confronted with disclosures in early March that he served in the Balkans as part of a German Army command that conducted reprisal killings of partisans and deported Greek Jews, Mr. Waldheim has issued dozens of statements clarifying his war record. He has repeatedly denied that he was involved in reprisals against partisans, but has admitted that he knew about them. ''I was far away from these atrocities, and I just got the reports,'' he said in an interview last month. ''I had to forward them, put them together, to forward to the high command.''
Other German Army documents found in the National Archives show that the small intelligence unit to which Mr. Waldheim was assigned as a first lieutenant was directly involved in the deportation of nearly 1,800 Greek Jews from the island of Corfu in 1944.
In April 1944, Mr. Waldheim's unit furnished the SS Security Police with the numbers of Jews and other foreigners living on Corfu. After arrangements were made for the ''accelerated evacuation'' of Jews by ship, the SS Security Police reported back to the unit in June that 1,795 Jews were ''seized and transported from the island.''
Mr. Waldheim's name is not mentioned in these documents, and whether he played a role in the deportation is unclear. Mr. Waldheim has denied that he knew about deportations.
But a duty roster indicates that the unit was small - about a dozen men -and identifies Mr. Waldheim's immediate superior, Lieut. Col. Herbert Warnstorff, as the man responsible for liaison work with the SS Security Police who carried out the deportations.
''Waldheim worked on a daily basis with Warnstorff, was his most important aide, and often sat in for him at general staff meetings,'' Professor Herzstein said. ''I find it highly unlikely that he wouldn't have been aware of such an important order.''
Dr. Herzstein served as a consultant for the World Jewish Congress, which has disclosed many of the details about Mr. Waldheim's war record.
Previous documents show only that deportations were carried out by the army group to which he was attached, which comprised about 300,000 men.
Another German war document casts doubt on Mr. Waldheim's assertions that he was assigned 200 miles away to an Italian mountain infantry division in July 1942 at the time of the Kozara massacre in the Balkans, in which thousands of partisans died.
According to the document, his German liaison staff with the Italian division was disbanded at the end of May and members of his unit were ordered to return to their permanent units.
There are no documents to indicate where Mr. Waldheim was sent, but he was awarded the King Zvonimir Medal for ''merit under enemy fire'' for the Kozara campaign.