Word: nazis
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Veterans' groups, acknowledging that Reagan has been a good friend of the military, were more restrained in their protests. "It would not sit well with American veterans for the President to lay a wreath at the graves of Nazi soldiers," said Clarence M. Bacon, national commander of the American Legion...
...unanimous. "That some of the men buried at Bitburg were members of the SS . . . does not make the visit less proper," argued the Houston Post. "Those men are dead, killed fighting as regular troops . . . Death does not distinguish among them, any more than it distinguishes them from Nazi victims." The cemetery stop, contended the Atlanta Constitution, demonstrates "this President's desire to put the atrocities and tensions of the past behind him and shift his focus to the radically different world community of the 1980s--where it belongs...
Reagan added further to his problems by dispatching longtime Aide Michael Deaver to West Germany to find a suitable concentration camp or synagogue for the President to pay his respects to the Nazi victims. Deaver, who had directed the arrangements for the visit from the start, swept into Bonn with an entourage of 20, leading some members of Kohl's staff to complain privately that Deaver travels with more aides than the Chancellor does. While many West Germans view Kohl as a genial but often bumbling politician, they see the men around Reagan as undignified novices who are ill-equipped...
Kohl also suggested that Reagan might want to appear with him at a Nazi concentration camp. Neither the President nor his aides have been able, or perhaps willing, to explain just what Reagan's reaction to the camp suggestion had been, or why, months later, Reagan seemed to imply that Kohl had never formally proposed such a visit. All that seems certain is that Reagan did not focus on Kohl's camp visit proposal, an error that was to have serious consequences...
...where he had long planned to make his first official V-E day observance. "Bergen-Belsen, a place in the center of Germany," he said, "remains the mark of Cain burned into the memory of our people . . . the site of a deluded will to destruction." Kohl recalled that the Nazis' "totalitarian regime was directed mainly against the Jews . . . The decisive question is why so many people remained indifferent . . . even if Auschwitz was beyond the power of human comprehension, the unscrupulous brutality of the Nazis was openly recognizable." Then the Chancellor noted that more than 50,000 Soviet prisoners...