http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id342.htmIn mid-April, White House press secretary Larry Speakes informed the media of the planned visit to Bitburg. When asked who was buried at Kolmeshohe, Speakes said he thought both American and German soldiers were there. Reporters soon discovered, however, that no American servicemen were in the cemetery; in fact, the remains of all U.S. soldiers had long since been removed from German soil. They also learned that a handful of the notorious SS were among the Germans interred at Kolmeshohe. The Waffen SS had been the combat branch of the Third Reich's elite guard, the Schutzstaffel . Created in 1923 to serve as Hitler's bodyguards, and expanded by Heinrich Himmler in the 1930s -- nearly one million men had served in the SS by the end of the war -- the Schutzstaffel included the Totenkopf, or "Death's Head" division, the men who had served as guards at the concentration camps. And a Waffen SS First Division battle group was responsible for the massacre of 71 American POWs at Malmedy, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. It wasn't clear if any of the SS troops buried at Kolmeshohe had participated in that or any other atrocity and, as Bitburg Mayor Theo Hallet pointed out, all German military cemeteries were likely to contain at least a few SS graves. Such distinctions, though, failed to placate those who were opposed to Reagan's visit on moral grounds.
One of the most eloquent of these opponents was Elie Wiesel, an author and concentration camp survivor to whom Reagan presented the Congressional Medal of Achievement during a White House ceremony just weeks prior to the president's European trip. "Mr. President," said Wiesel, in his remarks, "I am convinced . . . that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course you didn't know. But now we are all aware. May I . . . implore you to do something else, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place." Wiesel's protest was just one of many. The chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, called the proposed visit "so macabre and so awful that one can only wonder what possessed Reagan." Clarence M. Brown, national commander of the American Legion, warned that it would "not sit well" with veterans if Reagan were to "lay a wreath at the graves of Nazi soldiers." Former Army S/Sgt. Jim Hively mailed his World War II decorations, including a silver star and a bronze star, to Reagan in protest. In the Congress, 53 senators, 11 of them Republicans, signed a letter urging the president to cancel the visit, while 257 representatives, including 84 Republicans, signed a letter asking Chancellor Kohl to withdraw the invitation.
But Reagan would not budge, and neither would Kohl. "I will not give up the idea," said the West German leader in an interview with Time's Bonn bureau chief. "If we don't go to Bitburg, if we don't do what we jointly planned, we will deeply offend the feelings of
people." A poll revealed that 72% of West Germans thought the visit should go forward as planned. Kohl admitted that rarely had German-American relations been so strained. Indeed, it seemed that in the days leading up to the presidential visit, the White House and the Chancellery were pitted one against the other in the blame game. A top Reagan aide claimed the Germans had given assurances that nothing in the Bitburg visit would be an "embarrassment" for the president. "As clumsily as we handled it," said another U.S. official, "Kohl &. Co. have surpassed us in spades." A German official responded: "The Americans also have a responsibility toward the president. They must also check on the history that is beneath the ground. It was not very intelligent."
Reagan didn't help matters when he announced that he saw nothing wrong with visiting the cemetery because the German soldiers buried there were "victims of Nazism also . . . drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis." Equating Nazi soldiers with Holocaust victims, responded Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, was "a callous offense for the Jewish people." Many questioned Reagan's claim that most of the SS soldiers at Kolmeshohe had been teenagers drafted against their will into serving the Third Reich. But further research revealed that, indeed, most of the 49 SS dead were between the ages of 17 and 20. Kohl confirmed that in the last days of the war he was able to avoid service in the SS because he was only 15, "but they hanged a boy from a tree who was perhaps only two years older with a sign saying TRAITOR" because he had tried to run away rather than serve.
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