This week a commission of historians will deliver their verdict on the wartime conduct of Kurt Waldheim. For his most ardent supporter, his daughter Christa, there can be only one possible outcome.

‘IF I opened a paper tomorrow and read that my father had killed somebody, it wouldn’t throw me.’ The same woman later says: ‘It’s sometimes hard to keep your sanity and stop yourself going crazy.’ She is Dr Christa Karas-Waldheim, a 28-year-old law graduate and daughter of Dr Kurt Waldheim. The youngest of his three children by 11 years, she is the closest to her father and the most politically motivated.

Her relationship with her father is, she admits rather awkwardly, ‘abnormal’. She talks about him in romantic terms: ‘I always felt he understood me, never felt I couldn’t reach out. If he’s busy we can see each other at midnight.’ When she married last June – her husband is Austria’s most prominent young conservative politician – her father was not displaced. ‘I added his name to my married one because I feel very close to both of them.’ In Karas-Waldheim’s eyes, ‘Papi’, as she calls him, can do no wrong.

When her father decided to run for the Austrian Presidency in 1985 for the conservative People’s Party, after being rejected for a third term as Secretary-General of the United Nations, she left her job at the Austrian Academy of Science to campaign for him. ‘He cares about people and wants to help them. He was the best man for the job.’ Single-handedly and supported exclusively by donations, she enlisted thousands into her ‘people’s movement’. She would sleep four hours a night and speek up to eight times a day in different parts of the country, to crowds of sometimes 5,000 people. ‘I had never addressed more than 10 people before. It was terrifying.’

Then, in March 1986, three months before her father was eventually selected, what she wil only term the ‘smear campaign’ started. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) accused her father of being a member of the Nazi ‘browinshirts’ and later serving in a Wehrmacht unit where he must have been aware of the transporting of more than 40,000 Greek Jews to death camps during the Second World War.

His daughter says that the WJC’s ‘evidence’ came from socialist manipulators and that the allegations were ‘unfair weapons and lies’ employed by a frightened opposition.

Talking volubly and maintaining close eye-contact throughout, she constantly refers to her father as a victim and scapegoat. She was, she says, as astonished as her father by his opponents’ tactics.

The WJC claimed that Waldheim’s autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, published in 1985, was factually incorrect, particularly in its omission of any reference to military service after 1941. He did see further military service – the issue is where and in what capacity. His daughter says that the only stories she had heard about the war years were things like her sister – who is 14 years her elder – being born on a mountain top when her mother fled after the Russian invassion of Vienna.

And her father? ‘He was just a poor soldier in uniform obeying orders. It wasn’t a nice time. He didn’t like to remember it.’

Last autumn the Austrian government published ‘The White Book’ to rebut the WJC allegations and explain Waldheim’s ‘missing years’. During them, Waldheim claims, he served as a translator, as an officer in German intelligence, continued his legal studies then worked as an interpreter and collator of military information. ‘That was a very boring time,’ his daughter says. ‘I can’t imagine that anyone will want to read it.

She believes that she established such a close relationship with her father through being the youngest in the family. ‘I was spoilt, being the baby. My mother is my best girlfriend.’ She grew up in New York during her father’s terms as ambassador and at the United Nations. (Lycee educated, she now speaks ‘Berlitz American’ with a singing Austrian accent.) Rather than isolate her from his hectic life, Waldheim would take her to cocktail and dinner parties, luncheons and on trips. Despite his unremarkable career in the UN – he is best remembered for his arid and ponderous style – Karas-Waldheim says: ‘I saw that he was respected by the whole world. I was so proud of him.’ She was a trained gold and silversmith; but when Waldheim told her that she should study law, she did.

Karas-Waldheim cannot admit even the possibility that her father could be guilty ‘He never gave me any reason not to trust him or think he was lying.’ The greatest proof for her, if she needed it, was that her father managed to keep ‘cool and smiling’ throughout his presidential campaign. ‘It’s very tough to constantly defend yourself over something that you didn’t do. And difficult to lie, or lie on someone’s behalf, for a long time. If his conscience were not 1,000 per cent clean, he would have cracked.’

I ask whether it is not every daughter’s duty to defent her father? ‘It’s not out of duty,’ she snaps. ‘It is the only thing you can do when you love someone who is being attacked and treated unjustly.’ Her mother, she says, is still ‘madly in love’ with the man she met when they were both studying for law degrees. ‘After 43 years of marriage she is still extremely in love with my father and she wants to help him.’

Has she ever thought, in her darkest moments, that her father might have been associated with murderers? She is as taken aback at the word as she is when I mention Kluas Barbie – ‘Barbie was guilty, so should be punished, even after all these years.’ Then ‘No,’ she says in answer to the question about her father. Even if ‘they’ find something, it will, she says, be a forgery or invention.

Hypothetically, if he were guilty, she would defend him. ‘Being a daughter, the most important thing would be to defend your father. My main concern would be to keep his spirits lifted.’ When I ask her what she will tell her children about their grandfather, she is ruffled. The fact that lies can get out of hand, is the gist of her reply.

Karas-Waldheim regards the WJC, who sowed the seeds of doubt about her father’s military career, as a ‘bunch of radicals’, ‘a small group of baddies’, interested in spreading hatred and yearning to achieve a high profile as Nazi hunters. ‘I don’t think they could give a damn about my father: they just want to defend their good reputation. Of course the WJC have approached me. I don’t want to do anything to do with them.’

She doesn’t think that the children of those Jews who were killed have the right to persecute her father. ‘Particularly since he has proved that he didn’t do anything wrong.’ Jews, she adds, were not the only victims in the war. ‘But the children of these victims are making an innocent victim of my father.’

Waldheim’s supposed misfortunes initially produced a rallying of support and waves of antisemitism in Austria. Karas-Waldheim says she is not antisemitic. She says she has Jewish friends – ‘as does my father’. She receives crank telephone calls and hate mail (her friends are amused at the rapidity with which she changes her telephone number). Has her father received threats? ‘I don’t know if he tells me everything,’ she says in a rare concession.

Waldheim remains on the Watchlist, barred from the US. ‘Who cares?’ she says. with a great deal of care. ‘I wish he weren’t. But I am sure they will soon take him off and apologize.’ The fact that Austria is isolated – his controversial visit to the Pope last June and his trip to Jordon broke a year-long diplomatic quarantine – is not something that she recognizes. ‘He didn’t become President to see the world,’ she says sitting in the government office in which she works out the logistics of Austria joining the EEC.

People, she adds, were not outraged by his audience with the Pope. ‘They were proud. They flew a few people in to be outraged.’ Whether or not Waldheim receives the Pope on the papal visit to Austria this June depends on the findings of Hans Kurz and the other historians investigating the president’s wartime activities. There is no question, according to his daughter, that Waldheim should step down. Wherever she goes with him, she says, they hear cheering. ‘He is the luckiest president. There has never been one that the Austrians have shown their approval of so much.’