Another high honor for a hero of the Nazis

Kurt Waldheim gets medals first from the Nazis and now from the pope.

Kurt Waldheim would have us believe that he went through World War II deaf, blind and stupid to the atrocities going on all about him and perpetrated by units in which he served. But even if you buy the story that the former Austrian president and United Nations secretary general was ignorant of all that went on around him throughout the war, you still do not hand out medals to members of the Titanic crew.

And there is enough indication of Waldheim's complicity in World War II atrocities to resist the

temptation to give him the papal knighthood that Pope John Paul II conferred July 6. After all, it is not a matter of deciding whether to jail him. It is a matter of showing some restraint when it comes to freely handing out gratuitous praise to people who may not deserve it.

These are not wild charges casually made by anonymous sources against Waldheim. The U.S. Justice Department, among others, studied the matter and concluded that Waldheim had ''occupied positions of increasing responsibility and sensitivity for which he was decorated in regions where notoriously brutal actions were undertaken by the Nazi forces in which he served.'' Indeed, the evidence of at least silent complicity in atrocities is so compelling that Waldheim has been banned from entering the United States since 1987.

The papal honor now accorded him is an insult to this country and to all the victims of the Nazis.

The pope is not a man to do that with his eyes wide open. He is a decent man who knows, as a Pole, as well as anyone what the Nazi war machine did to the people of Europe.

Suffice it to say, this is one of the most naive things he has ever done. He has unnecessarily given terrible offense to millions of people who believe weak men like Waldheim who went along with monsters are in many ways worse than the monsters themselves. How could any thoughtful leader even go in the same room with Kurt Waldheim, let alone lend him the respectable cloak of a great religion? B.H.