Before the presidential elections, investigative journalist Alfred Worm revealed in the Austrian weekly news magazine Profil that there had been several omissions about Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945 in his recently published autobiography.
Waldheim had previously claimed to have received a medical discharge after being wounded in winter 1942. His aides at the United Nations even accused the Israeli mission of spreading rumors that he supported the Nazis.
Israeli ambassador Yehuda Zvi Blum denied the charges, saying, "We don't believe Waldheim ever supported the Nazis and we never said he did. We have many differences with him, but that isn't one of them."
A short time later, beginning on 4 March 1986, the World Jewish Congress alleged that Waldheim had lied about his service in the mounted corps of the SA and had concealed his service as a special missions staff officer (Ordonnanzoffizier) for Germany's Army Group E in Yugoslavia and Greece, from 1942 to 1944, based primarily on captured German wartime records held at the United States National Archives in Washington, DC, and in other archives.
The 23 March 1986 public disclosure by the World Jewish Congress that the organization had unearthed the fact that the United Nations War Crimes Commission concluded after the war that Waldheim was implicated in Nazi mass murder and should be arrested arguably transformed the Waldheim affair into the most sensational of all post-war Nazi scandals.
Waldheim called the allegations, which grew in magnitude in the ensuing months, "pure lies and malicious acts". Nevertheless, he admitted that he had known about German reprisals against partisans: "Yes, I knew. I was horrified. But what could I do? I had either to continue to serve or be executed."
He said that he had never fired a shot or even seen a partisan.
His former immediate superior at the time stated that Waldheim had "remained confined to a desk".
Former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky, of Jewish origin, denounced the actions of the World Jewish Congress as an "extraordinary infamy," adding that Austrians would not "allow the Jews abroad to ... tell us who should be our President."
Part of the reason for the controversy was Austria's refusal to address its national role in the Holocaust (many leading Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, were Austrians, and Austria became part of the Third Reich).
Austria refused to pay compensation to Nazi victims, and from 1970 onwards refused to investigate Austrian citizens who were senior Nazis. Stolen Jewish art remained public property a generation after the Waldheim affair.
Because the revelations leading to the Waldheim affair came shortly before the presidential election, there has been speculation about the background of the affair.
Declassified documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency show that the CIA had been aware of some details of his wartime past since 1945.
Information about Waldheim's wartime past was also previously published by a pro-German Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Volksblatt, during the 1971 presidential election campaign, including the claim of an SS membership, but the matter was supposedly regarded as unimportant or even advantageous for the candidate at that time.
According to several of Waldheim's obituarists, his wartime past and the discrepancies in his autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, must have been known to both superpowers before he was elected UN Secretary-General, and there were rumors that the KGB had blackmailed him during his UN time (for example here and here).
In 1994, former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky claimed in his book The Other Side of Deception that Mossad doctored Waldheim's file while he was serving as Secretary-General to implicate him in Nazi crimes. These allegedly false documents were subsequently "discovered" by Benjamin Netanyahu in the UN file and triggered the "Waldheim Affair". Ostrovsky says that this was motivated by Waldheim's criticism of Israel's war in Lebanon.
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