Word: bitburg
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...village, and massacred all 642 of them, including 207 children. They then burned the town to the ground. During the Battle of the Bulge, a Waffen SS battle group from the first division gunned down 71 American prisoners of war captured at Malmédy, Belgium, 40 miles northwest of Bitburg. Afterward, boisterous SS men used the bodies for target practice. Men from this division are also buried at Kolmeshöhe. It is not clear whether any of the men involved in the atrocities are buried there...
...graves at Kolmeshöhe, Bitburg Mayor Theo Hallet says, "Everybody knows that there is not a single military cemetery in Germany without tombs of SS soldiers...
...touched everywhere, not just the Western Front, but Piccadilly and the Champs Elysées and Stalingrad. Second, because it was both a war and a crime--6 million Jews and perhaps 4.5 million others exterminated. What Reagan may not understand is that cemeteries house visible ghosts. At Bitburg, the SS troops still rant and hunt. At Bergen-Belsen the children still weep...
...course, become a disaster. It turned out that no American dead from World War II are buried in Germany. It would have to be a purely German cemetery. And it turned out that Bitburg, the one suggested by Chancellor Kohl, contained the graves of 47 members...
...analogy does not hold, and that Kohl and Reagan could miss the point is at the heart of the Bitburg fiasco. World War II was unlike World War I, or any other war. It was unique because Nazism was unique. Nazi Germany was not just another belligerent; it was a criminal state. Even that term is inadequate...