I believe that museums are necessary especially for young people, because when the last Holocaust survivor has died there will be no one who can speak to them about these times. The Holocaust is an integral part of our history and as such all coming generations should always remember it.
Also shown with this essay is a Holocaust cover Wiesenthal signed for me. As he explains in the letter cited above, it displays a cache that he himself drew:
I have signed and am returning the first-day cover envelope as you request. The picture is one of several I made after my liberation from the Mauthausen camp by U.S. troops.
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Kurt Waldheim (1918-2007), a seemingly prosaic diplomat who became secretary-general of the United Nations – during which time he was highly critical of Israel and, on a 1973 visit to Yad Vashem, pointedly refused to wear a symbolic kippah – went on to serve as president of his native Austria, only to be barred from the U.S. for suspected involvement in Nazi war crimes.
When he was placed on the Justice Department’s “watch list” of prohibited persons in 1987, it was the first time the U.S. government branded the president of a friendly country an undesirable alien suspected of war crimes with the German army in World War II. He would remain on the watch list for the rest of his life, which rendered him an international pariah despite his denials of Nazi sympathies and the high positions he had held in Austria and at the United Nations.
For most of his six years in the largely ceremonial Austrian presidency, Waldheim was a virtual prisoner within his country, shunned by all but a few other countries, and he did not seek re-election.
The facts about what Waldheim did during the war years were never clearly established, and there was arguably no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he participated personally in murder or in other war crimes. However, there is strong evidence that he had concealed his role as a lieutenant with Nazi army units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between 1942 and 1944, and there is substantial proof that he lied about his whereabouts and activities during that period.
Although Waldheim was never tried, public disclosures in the mid-1980s included a secret 1948 finding by the UN War Crimes Commission that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute him for murder and for “putting hostages to death.” Though he alleged that his military career ended in 1942 after he was wounded on the Russian front, his claims were contradicted more than four decades later by witnesses, photographs, medals, and commendations given to him, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations
In the dramatically ironic December 5, 1979 correspondence on his secretary-general of the United Nations letterhead shown here, Waldheim writes to Wiesenthal at his Documentation Center in Vienna:
It is a great pleasure for me to join with the many others who are paying tribute to you on the occasion of your receiving the humanitarian award of the Eddie Cantor Charitable Foundation. You have played a major role in mobilizing world opinion against the crimes of Nazism and in insuring that these acts against humanity should not be forgotten and, above all, should never be repeated. Indeed, your activities over the years have greatly helped in keeping alive the consciousness of the unparalleled horrors that were perpetrated in our age.As you know, the United Nations from its inception has been deeply concerned with preventing genocide, racial intolerance and other violations of human rights. Important international conventions and resolutions have been adopted to this end. The spirit which underlies these declarations is that crimes must be duly exposed if their repetition is to be prevented.
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