On this day: Kurt Waldheim is inaugurated as Austrian president

His obituaries remembered him as a onetime president of Austria and as a former UN Secretary General. But Kurt Waldheim, who was 21 when the Second World War broke out, was also recalled for his reluctance to shed light on his past.

His election to Austria's highest office was certainly dominated by the revelations that he had been part of the Nazi Wehrmacht during the Holocaust. And during the five years he was in the post, Austria was viewed with suspicion by much of the rest of the world, with Waldheim placed on a US watch list.

The young Waldheim joined the German army at the start of the war, later writing in his autobiography: "I was wounded on the Eastern Front, was no longer fit for front-line service and completed my legal studies in Vienna, where I received my doctorate in 1944."

After the war he rose through Austria's diplomatic ranks, becoming foreign minister and then going to the UN. But it was on his second bid for the presidency that the media became consumed with his wartime record, namely his involvement in the transportation of Jews to concentration camps and other atrocities when he was serving as a lieutenant in the Balkans and Greece.