The Politics Of Antisemitic Prejudice by Richard Mitten

Author:Richard Mitten [Mitten, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000304640
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Search for the "Smoking Gun"

After the 25th of March, WJC spokesmen, emboldened by Herzstein's findings and the publication of the Yugoslav Odluka, became increasingly self-assured about their actions in exposing Waldheim's past. The strategy followed by the WJC, however, was in essence a continuation of the one it had pursued from the beginning, and was devoted principally: (1) to seeking out and making public more information about Waldheim's role in the Balkans, and (2) to redoubling their efforts to have Waldheim's name placed on the watch list, the case for which was only strengthened, in their view, by the documents which continued to surface.

It is not possible to mention all the details of the WJC s disclosures that followed over the next two and a half months. In most cases, the WJC's counsel Eli Rosenbaum carried out the research or research was commissioned,50 but the WJC also frequently made documents public which had appeared elsewhere, but which were deemed of sufficient interest to warrant publication. Several set assumptions informed Rosenbaum's further research and to a certain extent led him and the other officials of the WJC to misread evidence which would have modified the interpretations they had previously made. Waldheim's "Nazi past" and its corollary implication of National Socialist ideological conviction, for example, remained a given and was mentioned in future press releases only as background information. Other such assumptions included the view that Waldheim was a compelling and important figure in the general staff of Army Group E; that Waldheim had distinguished himself in the Kozara campaign in the spring and summer of 1942, for which he had received an important award; that he must have known of the deportation of the Jews from Salonika and, corresponding to his position in the general staff, would have been involved in them; and that he most likely had been involved in planning Operation Black in Montenegro in July, 1943. For the WJC, all these assumptions had been either fully established (the "Nazi past" with the caveats mentioned above), were shared by most other researchers, or had been provided by an acknowledged expert, Robert Herz stein.

A few examples will illustrate the nature of these further disclosures. The day after the Belgrade, Yugoslavia, daily Vercernije Novosti published excerpts from the file on Waldheim compiled by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission (the Odluka), concluding that the former U.N. Secretary General was "responsible for war crimes," the WJC issued a press release and an English translation of the file's contents.51 On 1 April, the WJC produced further evidence that "Kurt Waldheim was on the operations staff of the military unit which carried out the 'Kozara Massacres.'"52 Two weeks later they produced a copy of a German army document which had been "used as evidence of Nazi war crimes in Greece." This find, according to the WJC, provided "extraordinary corroboration" of the conclusions reached by Herzstein and the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission.53 On 14 May, the WJC produced yet more documents which "support charges by Yugoslavia linking the former U.

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