Word: bitburg
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...outraged and appalled by President Reagan's planned visit this Sunday, May 5, to the military cemetery in Bitburg. West Germany containing the graves of 49 Nazi SS soldiers. The President has said this visit will be a celebration of American German "reconciliation." Though our country is a friend and ally of West Germany--the spiritual heir to those Germans who resisted Nazism-Mr. Reagan has chosen to honor instead the graves of Germans who perpetrated the evil of Nazism Certainly there are more praiseworthy people- Germans who fought for freedom and against hatred to whom we might have paid...
...attempts to justify what was most likely an error in his staff's planning, the President has made statements we find very troubling. We are particularly disturbed by his remark that the Nazis buried at Bitburg "were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." Is it necessary to overlook the guilt of fascist Germans of 1945 in order to achieve reconciliation with the democratic Germans...
Although Reagan has agreed to visit the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp also, he will still go to Bitburg. Menachem Rosensalt, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which represents 5000 siblings of survivors, called Reagan's cemetery vacation plans a "calculated insult...
...statement last week that he cannot change plans now because he would lose face is absurd. The President in fact missed the ideal opportunity to gain tremendous approval from Americans and others, when Wiesel appealed to him publicly to alter his plans, and on humanitarian grounds avoid Bitburg. Rather than seeming weak, he would in fact have hammered home one of his most cherished points: that he is a President with compassion, a human being with a real respect for the deepest human concerns--dignity and life itself. But unfortunately the lesson he has taught us has been lost only...
...awkward moment. Larry Speakes had just announced President Reagan's intention to visit a German military cemetery near Bitburg when he travels to Europe next month to attend an economic summit meeting and commemorate the 40th anniversary of V-E day. A reporter asked who is buried there. The White House spokesman said he believed there were graves of both American and German soldiers at the site. Not so, an aide reported later: there are only Germans...