With so much attention having been lavished on last week’s 70th anniversary of VE Day, another anniversary, also connected to World War II, passed virtually unnoticed.
May 5 marked 30 years since President Ronald Reagan followed through on his hugely controversial decision to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Kolmeshöhe military cemetery at Bitburg, Germany, which contained the graves of dozens of Waffen SS, Hitler’s killer elite.
For a president and an administration normally so attuned to the importance of image and perception, the incident constituted an unprecedented public relations stumble – Reagan biographer Lou Cannon called it “the seminal symbolic disaster” of Reagan’s presidency.
What makes the story even more baffling is that Reagan was widely seen as warmly disposed and well intentioned toward Jews and Israel. Few experiences touched him as deeply as did his viewing of Nazi death-camp newsreels. “From then on,” he said, “I was concerned for the Jewish people.”
And Reagan had an instinctive affinity for Israel. “I’ve believed many things in my life,” he stated in his memoirs, “but no conviction I’ve ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel.”
As an actor who spent decades in the heavily Jewish environment of Hollywood, and who counted scores of Jews among his friends and colleagues, he moved easily in pro-Israel circles. Both as a private citizen and as governor of California he was a familiar sight and a favored speaker at various functions for Israel.
Reagan credited his parents for his immunity to anti-Semitism. He often related the story of how his father, a traveling salesman, was about to check into a hotel in some remote area late one night when the desk clerk casually remarked, “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it here; we don’t allow any Jews.” Whereupon Jack Reagan grabbed his bag and walked out the door. He spent the cold night sleeping in his car.
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It was shortly after Reagan’s smashing reelection victory in November 1984 that Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited the president to visit West Germany the following spring. Kohl suggested that, to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II and as a symbol of the strong postwar relationship that had blossomed between the U.S. and the Federal Republic of Germany, the two leaders stop at a military cemetery where both American and German soldiers were buried.
Kohl also proposed that he and Reagan visit the site of the Dachau concentration camp. Reagan had no objection to either idea.
Within days, however, West German officials were quietly indicating to their American counterparts that they were having serious second thoughts about the Dachau visit. The White House at first refused to remove Dachau from the president’s itinerary, but the German entreaties grew more emphatic and Reagan, who at any rate was much more comfortable visiting inspiring and uplifting venues, decided he wouldn’t visit Dachau after all.
The back and forth between the U.S. and West Germany over the president’s forthcoming visit had been conducted behind the scenes in the early winter months of 1984-85. Reagan himself lit the first flames of controversy when he publicly announced in late March that he would not be stopping at Dachau during his upcoming visit to West Germany.
He had no desire, the president said, to impute guilt for the war to a new generation of Germans. And then he made the astonishing statement that “very few” Germans living in 1985 were old enough to remember World War II and “none of them” had participated in Nazi atrocities.
A firestorm of criticism followed. Menachem Rosensaft, the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors, noted in a New York Times op-ed article that many if not most of the killers in the death camps “were in their 20’s and 30’s when they participated in the annihilation of six million European Jews…. Relatively few of these mass murderers died in battle, and only a handful of them were executed for their crimes after the war. Thus, many of them are today in their 60’s and 70’s, still alive and well and living in Germany.”
Dismay over the president’s remark that no living Germans were complicit in Nazi crimes was superseded the following month by disbelief when Reagan described the German troops buried at Bitburg as “victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform…. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
Some of the president’s defenders took to arguing that the overwhelming majority of German military personnel interred in Bitburg were regular Wehrmacht soldiers who died on the battlefield and likely were not involved in atrocities against civilians.
But Reagan had not made that distinction in his statement, and no rationalization could change the fact that 49 of the dead at Bitburg had served in the dreaded Waffen SS, whose depredations included the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943 and whose victims included 84 American prisoners of war methodically and viciously executed in the Belgian town of Malmedy on December 17, 1944.
It came as no surprise, then, that Jewish organizations, veterans’ groups, Holocaust survivors, church leaders, and newspaper editorialists denounced the president for his determination to see the visit through.
To be sure, many Americans (among them former president Richard Nixon, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr.) saw no harm in a visit to a German cemetery, even one containing SS graves, as a means of symbolizing the strong alliance between the U.S. and West Germany. Nevertheless, opposition to the visit was strong among Americans of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, a broad array of opinion makers, and most members of Congress.
To cite just one example of that opposition, an open letter to Reagan decrying his decision to go to Bitburg was signed by a number of prominent citizens representing a remarkably wide cross-section of American society. It read, in part:
To honor the perpetrators of Nazi outrages is to dishonor the sacrifice of millions of American and Allied soldiers who fought and died to liberate Europe from the Nazi death grip. And it mocks the suffering and death of millions of innocents, including six million Jews, who perished at Nazi hands.
The signatories to the letter were liberals and conservatives, Jews and non-Jews, blacks and whites, and included, among many others:
Rev. Jerry Falwell, president of the Moral Majority; Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP; Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO; Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King; Monsignor Daniel Hoye, general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference; Lt. Gen. James Gavin, U.S. Army (ret.), commanding general, 82nd Airborne Division; John Buchanan, chairman of the board of People for the American Way; David J. Zielinski, national commander of Catholic War Veterans; Aloysius Mazewski, president of the Polish American Congress; Kenneth J. Bialkin, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Rev. Arie R. Brouwer, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; David S. Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews; and Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow of the legendary singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
At a White House ceremony on April 19 in which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Elie Wiesel, the nation’s best known Holocaust survivor who was then serving as chairman of the United States Holocaust Council, turned to Reagan and delivered a memorably moving appeal:
Mr. President, we are grateful to the American army for liberating us. We are grateful to this country, the greatest democracy in the world, the freest nation in the world, the moral nation, the authority in the world. And we are grateful, especially, to this country for having offered us haven and refuge, and grateful to its leadership for being so friendly to Israel…. And as for yourself, Mr. President, we are so grateful to you for being a friend of the Jewish people, for trying to help the oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union…. And of course we thank you for your support of the Jewish state of Israel.
But Mr. President, I wouldn’t be the person I am, and you wouldn’t respect me for what I am, if I were not to tell you also of the sadness that is in my heart…. And I am sure that you, too, are sad for the same reasons. What can I do? I belong to a traumatized generation. And to us, as to you, symbols are important…. We have met four or five times. And each time I came away enriched, for I know of your commitment to humanity.
And therefore I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke, that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course you didn’t know. But now we are all aware.
May I, Mr. President, if it’s possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site? That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.
One of the many Americans opposed to the Bitburg visit was the first lady. Nancy Reagan pleaded with her husband to cancel the trip. In her memoirs she described herself as “furious at Helmut Kohl for not getting us out of it.”
At one point a livid Nancy confronted presidential aide Michael Deaver, with whom she’d always been close and who had coordinated the itinerary of the upcoming visit.
“How could you do this to Ronnie,” she shouted. “This will haunt him forever.”
Her relationship with Deaver was never the same after Bitburg.
In a rare rebuke to Reagan, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate in late April adopted a resolution cosponsored by 82 senators recommending that the president “reassess” his planned Bitburg visit and instead “visit a symbol of German democracy.” The day before, 257 of the 436 members of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives had signed a letter to Kohl urging him to withdraw the Bitburg invitation.
The West Germans, for their part, refused to let Reagan off the hook; in fact, the louder the criticism of the president grew, the more the Kohl government seemed determined to ensure that the visit take place as planned.
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Reagan knew that protesters would dog his visits to Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg and that his words at both sites would undergo intense worldwide scrutiny.
Responding to a letter from Judge Joseph Zingales of Bedford, Ohio, Reagan wrote, “These have been trying days for one who feels as deeply as I do about the inhumanity of the Nazi period. The Holocaust must never be forgotten and must never happen again. My purpose in accepting the chancellor’s invitation was to emphasize that fact. I hope the words I utter on the occasion will make plain that I’m not asking for forgiveness for those who perpetrated the monstrous crime; only remembrance so as to ensure it will never happen again.”
He expressed similar sentiments to Dr. Erwin T. Jacob of Tel Aviv, writing that “This whole situation with regard to my coming visit has been most distressing, especially so since I feel and have felt for 40 years that the Holocaust must never be forgotten and such a thing must never happen again. I hope when I am at Bergen-Belsen I’ll be able to say something that will explain my reason for going there…”
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Reagan’s words at Bitburg (the president and Nancy were both clearly ill at ease, spending just eight minutes at the cemetery, and as he passed the SS graves Reagan kept his head down in order not to look at them) drew mixed reviews due mainly to his continued insistence that he had done the right thing in coming there.
But his deportment and remarks at Bergen-Belsen, which he visited for nearly an hour before the stop at Bitburg, amounted to what Time magazine described as “a triumph of damage control” and Professor Jacob Neusner, a prominent scholar of Jewish history, called “one of the great speeches of our time on the subject beyond all speech.”
Indeed, by the time Reagan returned home from West Germany, polls showed that a solid majority of Americans – 59 percent – now said they supported his visit to Bitburg, a shift in sentiment no doubt influenced by his eloquent address at Bergen-Belsen.
In his address, Reagan had spoken of “Jews whose death was inflicted for no reason other than their very existence.” Visiting Bergen-Belsen had brought home “the horror of it all – the monstrous, incomprehensible horror.”
Even so, he continued, visitors “can never understand as the victims did. Nor with all our compassion can we feel what the survivors feel to this day and what they will feel as long as they live. What we’ve felt and are expressing with words cannot convey the suffering that they endured….
“Here, death ruled, but we’ve learned something as well…. we found that death cannot rule forever, and that’s why we’re here today. We’re here because humanity refuses to accept that freedom of the spirit of man can ever be extinguished….”
And then the president concluded:
Everywhere here are memories – pulling us, touching us, making us understand that they can never be erased. Such memories take us where God intended His children to go – toward learning, toward healing, and, above all, toward redemption. They beckon us through the endless stretches of our heart to the knowing commitment that the life of each individual can change the world and make it better.
We’re all witnesses; we share the glistening hope that rests in every human soul. Hope leads us, if we’re prepared to trust it, toward what our President Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. And then, rising above all this cruelty, out of this tragic and nightmarish time, beyond the anguish, the pain and the suffering for all time, we can and must pledge: Never again.
