Europe News
Waldheim remains controversial after death
Jun 15, 2007, 14:47 GMT
Vienna - Late former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim continued to cause controversy even after his death in his home country on Friday.
The liberal daily Der Standard said that it had to close down its internet forum only 10 minutes after the news of Waldheim's death onf Thursday. Website manager Gerlinde Hinterleitner said the action was taken after a huge number of 'disrespectful comments' about Waldheim had poured into the site.
'I also want to greet all those critical against me and ask to re- think their motives and - if possible - grant me late forgiveness,' Waldheim wrote in apparent reference to his having covered up his wartime Nazi past.
The former UN Secretary General said he 'deeply regretted' that he 'took position on Nazi crimes fully and clearly much too late.' The accusations had nothing in common with his thinking, he wrote, saying that his silence had nothing to do with his beliefs, but with his outrage over the extent oft the accusations.
Waldheim, who died on Thursday aged 88, will not receive a formal full state funeral, but a slightly adapted ceremony, the presidential office said on Friday afternoon.
After a requiem in Vienna's St. Stephens Cathedral, Waldheim will be interred on Saturday afternoon with full military honours. The main difference to a full state funeral is that there will be no lying in state for the public.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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Older Talkback
page: 1
i knew kurt to be a good man.
Waldheim should have been cremated at Auschwitz after death and had his ashes sprinkled over a Nazi graveyard.
In other words Waldheim was a patriotic German trying to take Germany back and restore it for Germans. Jews since biblical times have been guests in The various Nations, and not always good ones.
In Bolshevik Russia it is said 20 million or more Gentile Christians were murdered by a revolution controlled by jews.
If you are a jew are you prepared to start building holocaust museums for the Russian dead?
In America Jewish organizations, ADL, ACLU, SPLC, AJC ad nauseum have worked since the early 1900s to take down my peoples crosses. Take prayer out of schools. Destroy our morality with their 'freedom' in media dominance. I say enough is enough,
it's time to start acting like respectfull guests.
page: 1
Proud JewJun 15th, 2007 - 16:24:53
What do you expect? Waldheim covered up his later WWII career, in which he was Italian interpreter for the Wehrmacht's 10 Army's commander Gen. Loehr. This was the only Wehrmacht unit to systematically engage in atrocities against Jews. The 10th Army did a have little problem, though. The Italians were not interested in killing Jews and did everything they could to rescue them. So what were the contents of the conversations Waldheim interpreted between the Jew-killing Germans and the resistant Italians? Waldheim saw fit to cover this little inconvient history of his up.
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