Word: bitburg
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...much victims as those whom the Germans tortured and murdered. There is also a distinction to be drawn between Hitler's soldiers and the Kaiser's. Mitterrand's choice of Verdun, the awful symbol of World War I, shows a grasp of that distinction. The choice of Bitburg does...
...further directive in 1940 elaborated their future role. After the war the Third Reich would be expected to contain many non-Germanic nationalities. The Waffen SS would be the special state police force to keep order among these unruly elements. They proved themselves during the war: 40 miles from Bitburg, the Waffen SS murdered 71 American POWs...
...Jews, a camp; for Kohl, Bitburg; and for American vets, perhaps a sonorous speech. The picture now contains all the right elements. But the elements do not sit well on the canvas. They mock one another. What can it mean to honor the murdered if one also honors the murderers and their Praetorian Guard? This is photo opportunity morality, and so transparent that it will convince no one, offend everyone...
Peter Boenisch, a Bonn government spokesman, complaining about the uproar in the U.S. over the Bitburg visit, said, "We can't start denazification of the cemeteries." Exactly. That's the reason to stay away...
...built around the thin strand of decency, symbolized by people like Adenauer and Brandt, that reaches back to the pre-Nazi era. If history is what the President wants to acknowledge, it is this German history that deserves remembrance. For Kohl and Reagan to lay a wreath at Bitburg is to subvert, however thoughtlessly, the discontinuity that is the moral foundation of the new Germany...