Word: germanized
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...called Provisional Camp Bergen-Belsen because, unlike other concentration camps, it was originally designed as a "holding pen" for Jews who were to be exchanged for German prisoners of war. Established in 1943, near Hanover in northwestern Germany, Bergen-Belsen was built to contain 10,000 prisoners and was run, like all the camps, by the SS. In 1944 the commandant, SS Major Josef Kramer, later known as the Beast of Belsen, began accepting inmates from other camps who were too frail to continue their slave labor. The population of 15,000 Jews was swollen by thousands of new prisoners...
...unassuming Kolmeshöhe cemetery, German and American flags flutter from the tower that overlooks the quaint, newly restored town of Bitburg. The two flags symbolize the friendship that Bitburg's German residents and the 10,600 Americans connected with the U.S. air base there have come to associate with their haven in the Eifel hills near the Luxembourg border. Each year since the cemetery was consecrated in 1959, American and French military officials have joined Germans in a wreath-laying ceremony at Kolmeshöhe. This year Ronald Reagan intends to place a wreath there, and late last week, the cemetery...
...question of who lies beneath those shining headstones has fueled the controversy over the President's visit, making the placid little cemetery the focus of intense international scrutiny. Most of the more than 2,000 soldiers buried at Kolmeshöhe were killed in the German offensive of December 1944- January 1945 known as the Battle of the Bulge, which produced more than 100,000 German and 81,000 Allied casualties, 77,000 of them Americans...
...this sound and fury must seem terribly mysterious to Ronald Reagan--a national uproar over visits to a German cemetery. Are we not the future-facing republic? Is it not right to celebrate V-E day with a show of American magnanimity? The nation's response has been a loud and firm no, but it is a no that derives from history, not from meanness of spirit. The nightmare of World War II is simply not to be smiled away, first because the war touched everywhere, not just the Western Front, but Piccadilly and the Champs Elysées and Stalingrad...
...which millions of people had fought and worked and prayed and died. Yet, ironically, it was a day on which little of substance actually happened. There were speeches, cheers and parades, but the German surrender had been signed early on May 7, and almost all the fighting had ended well before that. "We play softball every afternoon," a member of the U.S. 667th Field Artillery Battalion, at a German village near the Czech border, wrote in his diary. "I've had a shower, two movies and a U.S.O. show." Wrote one of his buddies: "V-E day. Just another...