Word: bitburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...yearlong pageant of World War II commemorations across Europe, including the D-day ceremonies on France's Normandy beaches last June, a reunion of U.S. and Soviet veterans on the banks of the Elbe River late last month and President Reagan's visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg. But the Soviet ceremony stood in sharp contrast to the muted V-E day commemorations a day earlier* in Western Europe --and once again highlighted the antipathy that has grown among erstwhile allies. Said a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "It has been very difficult for us to take...
...food and war materiel between 1941 and 1945. At the same time, the Soviets have portrayed West Germany and the U.S. as Hitler's successors. Soviet commentators have accused the West Germans of "revanchism," or wanting to retake German territories lost in the war, and have condemned Reagan's Bitburg visit as paying homage to the Nazis. The Soviets gloss over Moscow's nonaggression pact with Hitler, which lasted for 22 months before the Nazi dictator broke the agreement by invading the U.S.S.R. in June...
over his visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg). The President originally proposed a military budget increase of 5.9% in excess of inflation; in April he came down grudgingly to 3%, but would not budge beyond that...
Once the prospect of his visit to a German military cemetery at Bitburg stirred a violent storm, Reagan, clearly pained, insisted repeatedly that while "we will never forget" the Holocaust, the gesture was a matter not of forgiving and forgetting but of moving forward, of trying to achieve a genuine healing, a reconciliation, of celebrating the 40 years during which the U.S. and West Germany have been strong allies. In a thoroughly American way, Reagan wanted finally to clear the past off the highway, as if it were some sort of old wreck. He wished to proceed, as Lincoln said...
...then recognize, if there's any celebration, it is a celebration of what has followed, that from the end of that war came this complete turnaround that has led now to 40 years of peace, plus our onetime enemies' being, you might say, our staunchest allies. Bitburg was picked because that is where there are German and American forces working together on the NATO line...