Kurt Waldheim (born 1918) was an Austrian diplomat and politician who served as secretary general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1982. In 1986 he was elected president of Austria despite a controversy over his role as a Nazi intelligence officer in World War II.

Kurt Waldheim was born in St. Andrä-Wördern, a village near Vienna, Austria, on December 21, 1918. His father was a Roman Catholic school inspector and an active Christian Socialist. Waldheim's youth was spent in a country searching for identity amid domestic turmoil. During his years of schooling at the Vienna Consular Academy he was nonpartisan politically.

War Record

After graduation in 1936 Waldheim entered the University of Vienna and studied law and diplomacy. In 1938, three weeks after Adolph Hitler annexed Austria, Waldheim joined the Nazi student union, and later that year he joined the mounted unit of the Nazis' notorious paramilitary force, the Sturm- Abteilung...