It would have been hard to elect someone who hadn’t served some time in the German military. A sizable majority of Austrian Germans did something related to the war during WWII after all. Kurt Waldheim was not the first former Wehrmacht officer to serve as president. His predecessor, Rudolf Kirchschläger, had been drafted in 1938 and rose to the position of captain in the Wehrmacht by the time the war ended. Plus Kurt Steyrer, the Socialist candidate he ran directly against, had served as a medical corpsman in the Luftwaffe. Politicians tend to peak in their 40s to 60s. By the 1980s most of the leading Austrian politicians had been young men during WWII. Which meant most of them had also been in the Wehrmacht.

The big concern wasn’t that Waldheim had served in WWII. The concern that broke open during the 1986 campaign was that he had glossed over his service history in his autobiography; implying that he’d been in university after 1942 instead of in the Balkans. And of course he skipped over the fact that he had served on the staff of General Alexander Lohr who was executed as a war criminal in 1947.

However he started the campaign with a commanding lead. He had been recruited to join the SPÖ the year before because he was highly respected. As the campaign ads called him, he was “the man the world respects.” And the Socialists were burdened with unpopularity over their economic programs.

Steyrer said in a concession interview that he thought the accusations actually hurt the Socialists. There’s definitely something to to that. The popular view of many turned into one of a man who was drafted into a war he didn’t want to be in, and spent most of the war pushing papers or back in Vienna in school. And while the investigations into Waldheim showed that he had served next to some terrible men, there wasn’t any hard evidence that he had participated in any war crimes himself. The electorate was willing to give Waldheim a pass, because to do otherwise would mean looking too deeply into everyone’s past. To say that Waldheim was guilty of misconduct might also mean that dad or grandpa also participated in misconduct, and that was something the electorate wasn’t willing to do.