Word: bitburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Only seven days earlier, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had endured the strain of President Reagan's controversial visit to a military cemetery at Bitburg with its Nazi graves. Last week the Chancellor faced an ordeal that was, in terms of his political future, more significant. In the most important state election since Kohl's national victory two years ago, voters went to the polls in North Rhine-Westphalia, whose 17 million residents represent more than a quarter of the country's electorate. The result: a stinging setback for the Chancellor...
...symbolism of his visit to the Bitburg cemetery, where 49 SS men are buried, clouded Reagan's goal of bringing about a healing. Before the trip, Reagan made matters worse when he said that young German soldiers were just as much victims of the Third Reich as the Jews were--a grotesque equation even if inadvertent. That statement, coupled with the visit to Bitburg, left an impression that the President of the U.S. was conferring a sort of official forgiveness upon the German army that did Hitler's work...
...Reagan meant to set the past to rest, Bitburg brought it back to angry life. Yet there were many voices muttering, "Must we hear about the Holocaust again?" There have, after all, been other great tragedies in history--the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, Stalin's liquidation of millions of kulaks and the enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33, the destruction of perhaps 2 million Kampucheans by their own Khmer Rouge countrymen...
After the vexing economic summit in Bonn and the controversial visit to the Bitburg military cemetery, Reagan's second week in Europe was largely upbeat and colorful, with everything from a joyous German pep rally to unruly Spanish protests. The Strasbourg speech put the President back on the diplomatic high ground. The address underscored the theme of resurgent democracy that Reagan repeated throughout his ten-day stay in Europe. "History is on the side of the free," he said, "because freedom is right and because freedom works...
More impartial witnesses gave his trip mixed reviews. The Bonn economic summit ended in disappointment when French President Francois Mitterrand refused to join the other leaders in agreeing to a new round of trade talks. Reagan managed to defuse the Bitburg uproar, but the incident nevertheless left a sour taste. By and large, however, Reagan handled his diplomatic duties with sensitivity and skill. Whether they liked him or not, Europeans could no longer dismiss him as an unschooled cowboy, as they did a few short years...