Secret Archives: Former UN Chief Kurt Waldheim Ordered Liquidations in Sarajevo in 1944

Former United Nations Secretary-General and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim ordered the liquidation of several individuals in Sarajevo in November 1944, according to documents from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which have been opened to the public after 70 years, reports the Bosnian news agency Patria (NAP).

The United Nations War Crimes Commission released specially classified documents this month concerning investigations against Nazis and war crimes from 1943 to 1949. The invaluable collection contains over 370,000 pages detailing some entirely unknown crimes, not only by Nazis but also, for example, Bulgarian crimes in Macedonia, from where they displaced and killed a large number of Jews.

According to American media, the collection will be available for a limited time only. Until now, access was only possible with the consent of the US Ambassador to the UN and the UN Secretary-General.

As reported by American media, one of the most interesting documents is testimony that a former high-ranking UN official was, in fact, a war criminal. Stains on the career of Waldheim, who was the President of Austria until 1992 and died in 2007, were only discovered in 2008, when it was established that he was an active Wehrmacht officer. Waldheim's official biography states that he served in several locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly in Sarajevo, reports NAP.

The revelation of his Nazi past was a scandal of global proportions, but Waldheim denied it during his lifetime, only admitting before his death that he was a soldier, claiming he had done nothing wrong.