Twenty files on Adolf Hitler, Josef Mengele and other top Nazis were released by the US intelligence service, the CIA, at the end of last week, including material on the former Austrian president Kurt Waldheim. They prove that, by 1945, the CIA already knew, via British intelligence agents, about Mr Waldheim's wartime curriculum vitae.
As a 24-year old, the document confirmed, Mr Waldheim had worked as a fairly junior Wehrmacht officer in a Nazi intelligent unit in the Balkans which was renowned for the atrocities it committed. However, the document was forgotten by the time Mr Waldheim was first suggested as UN secretary general years in 1971. A CIA check on him at the time revealed nothing suspicious.
The opening of the files has now debunked allegations that Mr Waldheim had acted as an informer for the CIA and also that the KGB used knowledge of his past to blackmail him. He served two terms as UN secretary general until 1981.
Five years later he became Austrian president, despite allegations having been made about his Nazi past. His single term in office was clouded as a result and his refusal to resign ushered in a damaging and unprecedented period of isolation for the Alpine republic.
In 1988 an international commission of historians presented no information to back the allegations, but concluded that Mr Waldheim had been "in close proximity to some Nazi atrocities, knew they were going on and made no attempt to stop them". It accused him of making his army service appear harmless once it had come to light.
Now 82, the former Austrian president, who still remains on the US government's "watch list", compiled to keep Nazi suspects out of America, made a rare appearance on Austrian television this week to insist that the files cleared him of wrongdoing - although he did not elaborate.
In the past he has always denied his involvement in war crimes. The re-emergence of the Waldheim case has, incredibly, received little coverage in the Austrian press. Commentators and ordinary Austrians admit that it is an issue which "still traumatises us".
The flak received from abroad was a huge setback in the international development of a country which, after 1945, had successfully managed to develop a cosy image built around Mozart and mountain yodellers.
In her insightful book on recent Austrian history, Guilty Victim, looking back to 1986, Hella Pick says that it was "inevitable that the case against [Waldheim] would develop into a case against Austria".
The anti-Waldheim campaign was a painful time for Austria as the international community put it in the dock, accusing it of portraying itself as a Nazi victim rather than acknowledging its perpetrator role.
In short, the Waldheim era forced Austrians into an important, though painful, bout of soul searching and historical reappraisal. An unprecedented, and hugely passionate, nationwide debate was sparked.
"Once the stigma of guilt had appeared on Waldheim's forehead, it led to turbulent clashes between young and old, black [conservatives] and red [socialists]," writes journalist Arnim Thurnherr in his critical examination of Austria, The Trauma, A Life.
Ms Pick writes that "Austria had suddenly come to the realisation that it could not live in the present, continuing to see itself as a 'blessed isle' floating happily with a good conscience in quiet waters away from the turbulence of the east-west relationship".
She quotes Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, as saying: "The issue is not Kurt Waldheim. He is a mirror of Austria. His lies are of secondary importance. The real issue is that Austria has lied for decades about its own involvement in the atrocities Mr Waldheim was involved in."
Tabloid headlines at the time, which claimed that Mr Waldheim was a "Nazi butcher", were grossly untrue. In truth, Mr Waldheim's wartime role was similar to that of the average Austrian soldier, few of whom got out with clean hands from a war that was so ridden with atrocities.
But Mr Waldheim's problem was precisely because he was a "monument to Austrian averageness", as Thurnherr puts it. He found himself at the centre of a long-awaited inter-generational conflict in which young people started asking questions of their elders such as: "How did you do it?", "Why did you do it?" and "Why didn't you stand up against Hitler?" The reply was generally: "How dare you young people criticise us - you weren't there, you know nothing."
It was a questioning process that had already begun in Germany some 20 years before. "It was the war generation's lack of remorse and their arrogance that they were right which got to us," says a Viennese man who was a 17-year old student at the time.
"Waldheim represented perfectly the attitude of getting away with it, of being part of a regime and managing to resurface after it, which represents the attitudes of a whole generation."
Recently, Peter Michael Lingens, the former editor of the news magazine Profil, which carried some of the heftiest criticism of Mr Waldheim in Austria, admitted that Mr Waldheim was a pawn in the process of forcing Austria to look at its Nazi past. He said that Profil had done wrong by Mr Waldheim, but added that it had a point to make and that the former Nazi offered a way to make it.
The examination of Austria throughout the Waldheim saga undoubtedly helped to sharpen the world's attention towards other cover-ups, namely in France and the Channel Islands. However, there is little doubt that it also created a nationalist surge back home as some Austrians acutely felt, and took personally, the relentless international criticism.
Is it a coincidence that in the same year that Mr Waldheim came to power, Jörg Haider took over the leadership of the Freedom party, steering it away from its fairly liberal agenda towards the far right. Another man who has successfully managed to pit little Austria against the rest of the world.
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