Kurt Waldheim: Kurt Waldheim, who has died aged 88 of heart failure, served two terms as secretary general of the United Nations (1972-82) before it was revealed that he had lied about his wartime service with the German Wehrmacht during his 1986 campaign for the presidency of Austria.
Cynics maintain that Austrians never could decide whether they had been conquered or liberated in 1945, so his lies about his army days made him an ideal candidate in one respect: he was the perfect symbol of Austria's ambiguous feelings about the Nazi era.
But his stubborn insistence on remaining in the presidential race did a great disservice to his country, as did the comfortable majority he then won in the election to the mostly ceremonial office.
He had announced his candidacy in November 1985, soon after publishing his memoirs, In the Eye of the Storm- a more apposite title than he could have known.
An Austrian writer researching something else stumbled across papers in German military and Austrian ministerial archives referring to Waldheim's war service.
An Austrian magazine revealed that the autobiography had covered up facts about this part of his life: there were lies of omission and also of distortion. For example, Waldheim wrote that he had been studying for a doctorate in 1942 and 1943, when he had actually been serving in the Balkans.
The hunt for more facts was taken up by the World Jewish Congress and international media. Several governments, most notably the British ministry of defence, launched their own inquiries.
Investigators discovered that Waldheim had joined the Wehrmacht (Austria had been willingly annexed by the Third Reich in 1938) and served as a first lieutenant on the staff of Gen Friedrich Stahl's battlegroup West Bosnia and/or that of Army Group E, of which it was part. Army Group E was commanded by Gen Alexander Lohr, the butcher of the Balkans, who was tried, convicted of war crimes and executed by Yugoslavia in 1947. Waldheim worked as a liaison officer-cum-interpreter to Italian army units stationed in the Balkans.
His initials are to be seen on reports about mass deportations of Jews from Greece to death camps, the bloody suppression of partisans, the use of Italian troops as forced labour after Italy's surrender and the "special treatment" (summary execution) ordered for captured British commandos.
Even if Waldheim had initialled the reports without reading them, his pretence that he never knew was fatuous.
But no evidence was found that Waldheim had taken any personal or active part in any war crime, despite massive searches in the archives of half a dozen countries.
Both the ministry of defence in London and Simon Wiesenthal, the implacable Austrian-Jewish Nazi hunter, confirmed there was no evidence that Waldheim had committed war crimes. Lack of moral courage never has been a crime and cannot be required of anyone, especially in retrospect.
Waldheim's offence was to lie, and when exposed for lying, to persist - even as the truth about his war service emerged piecemeal. First, he said he was not there, and then that he was there, but had never known what was going on. Finally, he said he could not understand what all the fuss was about. The contrast with his German presidential contemporary, Richard von Weizsacker, who took full responsibility and apologised for his own wartime service as a military intelligence officer, could not have been greater.
The other side of what became known as "the Waldheim affair" was the dispiriting hypocrisy of so many of his accusers. The US declared him persona non gratain April 1987, an unprecedented humiliation for the head of a friendly state. The origin of this pious and belated move was pressure from the American Jewish lobby.
When Waldheim was first considered in 1971 for appointment by the security council as UN secretary general, he was investigated by the intelligence services of the permanent members of the council, including the US, Britain and Russia.
Since the Yugoslavs had reported him as a suspect to the Allied War Crimes Commission in 1947, those countries must have known there was a question mark against his name, at least meriting investigation before endorsement. The Israelis seem also to have known, but they, the Yugoslavs and the leading powers said not a word as Waldheim took office in 1972, and again for a second term in 1977. The conspiracy theorists said this international cover-up was a quid pro quo for Waldheim's agreement secretly to serve the interests of the conspirators.
The belated furore in 1986 ludicrously implied that higher standards were needed for the Austrian presidency than for the UN general secretaryship.
Waldheim was born in a village near Vienna, the son of a school inspector of Czech origin. He was educated in the city, studying at the Consular Academy and then at the university there, earning his doctorate in 1944 while on sick leave from the German army. At that time he married Elisabeth Ritschel, daughter of a prominent Austrian Nazi and a convinced Nazi herself.
They had two daughters and a son. Waldheim never joined the Nazi party, a fact which may have briefly aroused the suspicion of the Gestapo before he joined the army.
After the war he entered the Austrian foreign service, serving as ambassador to Canada (1956-60), rising swiftly all the way to foreign minister in 1968, after four years as Austria's permanent representative at the UN. He returned to the UN in 1971 after losing that year's presidential election and became secretary general on January 1st, 1972. At the UN, he travelled widely, inspecting peace-keeping operations in Cyprus and the Middle East, and visiting UN relief missions.
But the man who was the most exalted Austrian diplomat since Prince Metternich turned out to have feet of clay. He decided not to seek re-election as Austria's president in 1992 because one six-year term as an international pariah had proved enough.
Yet he never gave any sign that he understood why he had been so shunned. He is survived by his wife and children.
Kurt Josef Waldheim: born December 21st, 1918; died June 14th, 2007.