The International Committee of historians
Because of the ongoing international controversy, the Austrian government decided to appoint an international committee of historians to examine Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945. Their report cited evidence of Waldheim's knowledge about preparation for war crimes but denied any personal involvement in those crimes. According to the controversial Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up by Eli Rosenbaum, the Austrian government and a number of media outlets vigorously opposed the allegations both before and after the release of the report.[24] During the controversy, Waldheim was defended by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal,[25] who stated in a letter to The Forward, published October 15, 1993:
The people from the World Jewish Congress, who were so committed to the Waldheim case, find it difficult to accept the results of the international commission of historians. This commission, which was formed at my instigation in Vienna, had come to the conclusion that Mr. Waldheim knew about the wartime crimes in the Balkans but that he was not personally involved in these. A similar judgment was pronounced by a committee that examined the documents about Mr. Waldheim on Thames Television in London. The committee included some of the most respected jurists; the former director of the Office of Special Investigations, Alan Ryan, functioned as prosecutor. This group, too, concluded that there is no 'case' against Mr. Waldheim.
As Simon Wiesenthal publicly stated, there was no evidence found by the committee that Waldheim took part in any war crimes. Rather Waldheim's offence has been to lie about his military record. [26] The International Committee in February 1988 concluded, with regard to Waldheim's ability to do something about the crimes he knew that were going on in Yugoslavia and Greece:
In favour of Waldheim is, that he only had very minor possibilities to act against the injustices happening. Actions against these, depending on which level the resistance occurred, were of very different importance. For a young member of the staff, who did not have any military authority on the army group level, the practical possibilities for resistance were very limited and with a high probability would not have led to any actual results. Resistance would have been limited to a formal protest or on the refusal to serve any longer in the army, which would have seemed to be a courageous act, however would have not led to any practical achievement. [27]
[edit] Ostrovsky claims
In 1994 the supposed former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky claimed in his book The Other Side of Deception that Mossad doctored the file of the then UN Secretary General to implicate him in Nazi crimes. These false documents were subsequently "discovered" by Benjamin Netanyahu in the UN file, and triggered the "Waldheim Affair". Ostrovsky says the reason was Waldheim's criticism of Israeli action in Lebanon. [28] Debate surrounds Ostrovsky and his writings but they have not as yet been shown to be false, nor have they been shown to be true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Waldheim