May 5, 1985, 40 years ago: President Ronald Reagan, in Europe to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of V-E Day, the Allied victory in World War II (May 8, 1945), attends a ceremony, along with the Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, at Kolmeshöhe Military Cemetery in Bitburg, in the Rhineland, near Germany's borders with France and Luxembourg.
The announcement that the visit, part of Reagan's larger mission to Germany, which also included an "economic summit" of the "Group of Seven" or "G7" countries (also including Canada, Britain, France, Italy and Japan) in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, was made on April 11.
The visit was seen by Reagan and his supporters as a gesture of reconciliation. But after the arrangements had already been made, it was discovered that, of the 2,000 graves at that cemetery, in addition to ordinary German soldiers -- one was never identified, so his tombstone read simply, "Ein Deutschen Soldat" -- there were the graves of 49 members of the Waffen-SS. (Waffen meaning "Armed," so this was the military arm of the SS, which stood for Schutzstaffel, meaning "Protection Squadron").
These were not men who had done no more politically than fight for their country, even if it was against America. The postwar Nuremberg Trials had declared the entire SS to be a terrorist organization. These were officers, volunteers, men devoted to the Nazi cause, perfectly willing to torture and kill those they saw as less than the German ideal.
And Reagan had agreed to visit their graves.
I was 15 years old at the time, and an American of Polish descent on one side of my family, and Jewish descent on the other. To me, the biggest outrage was that there wasn't more outrage over this. There were still a lot of World War II veterans -- and a lot of Holocaust survivors -- alive in America, to whom this was an implicit insult.
Or, to put it another way: Suppose, at the 50th Anniversary celebrations in 1995, President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had visited the graves of KGB agents in Russia. (Spoiler Alert: He didn't do that.) The Republicans would have had an unholy fit. That should have been the reaction of decent people in America, Republicans as well as Democrats, over Reagan's plan to go to Bitburg.
Some did react with anger. Some, merely with sadness. Speaking of Clinton, at the time, he was in his 3rd term as Governor of Arkansas. His daughter Chelsea was just 5 years old, and she wrote a letter to Reagan, asking him to call off the visit to the cemetery.
A long-scheduled ceremony in the White House on April 19, awarding the Congressional Medal of Achievement, provided author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel -- who would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year -- with an unprecedented opportunity to publicly confront the White House on national television.
Despite fierce pressure to mute the confrontation with Reagan, whose strong support of Israel was valued, Wiesel implored him not to go to Bitburg. He said, "That place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."
Other Jewish leaders similarly called on Reagan to reconsider, as did 53 U.S. Senators on April 15, and 101 members of the U.S. House of Representatives on April 19 in bipartisan letters to the President.
Upon meeting with Kohl, a change of plans was made. "The leader of the free world" and the leader of democratic, tolerant postwar Germany would first visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to pay tribute to the Nazis' victims, before going to Bitburg, leaving just 8 minutes for the visit.
Of course, "The Teflon President" got away with it, just like he got away with everything else.
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