Bitburg

President Ronald Reagan and federal chancellor Helmut Kohl made a highly controversial visit on May 5, 1985, to the Bitburg war cemetery to honor German soldiers who had died in World War II.

Kohl, chairman of the Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Demo­cratic Party, or CDU), who had been ex­cluded from the Western Allies’ commem­oration of the fortiethth anniversary of D-Day in June 1984, desired a symbolic gesture of reconciliation and friendship be­tween the former enemies of World War II. French president Francois Mitterand obliged by meeting Kohl at the battlefield of Verdun. During a visit to the White House in November 1984, the chancellor proposed a similar event to Reagan, to be scheduled during the upcoming economic summit in Bonn in early May 1985. Michael Deaver, the White House chief of staff, developed the program in coopera­tion with the federal chancellory.

The original plan called for honoring both U.S. and German graves. Since no U.S. soldiers are buried in Germany, the German war cemetery in Bitburg was cho­sen, mostly for its logistically convenient proximity to a U.S. Air Force base. The planners remained unaware of the presence of Waffen-SS graves. Kohl had also sug­gested an additional visit to the concentra­tion camp Dachau. The White House mis­takenly believed that the chancellor would prefer not to be embarrassed by being re­minded of Nazi crimes, however, and re­moved the visit from the program.

The scandal broke when journalists discovered Waffen-SS graves at the ceme­tery only a few days after the Bitburg visit was announced on April 11, 1985. The Waffen-SS had been instrumental in the implementation of the Holocaust and had committed war crimes throughout Europe, including a massacre of U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) at Malmedy. By going to Bit­burg, not only did the U.S. president honor the perpetrators, but also he ignored their victims by refusing to visit a concen­tration camp. Even worse, during a press conference Reagan equated murderers and victims when he maintained that German soldiers were victims of Nazism “as surely as the victims of the concentration camps” (New York Times, April 19, 1985).

For a month Bitburg remained on the front pages of newspapers and was the top news item in TV news and political talk shows in the United States. As the various fortieth anniversaries of World War II events had passed, the media had regularly published documentary accounts of the fighting and the atrocities. On prime-time TV, graphic historical footage of the liber­ation of concentration camps ran next to the latest on the Bitburg scandal. Published opinion was almost unanimous in its con­demnation of the visit; editorials called for cancelling the ceremony or at least chang­ing the itinerary to include a concentration camp. Instead of Reagan, an inept White House staff and a stubborn Kohl were blamed for the fiasco. Passionate opposi­tion to the visit was widespread. Veterans’ groups charged Reagan with dishonoring the sacrifices of U.S. soldiers. All major churches condemned the visit as an insult to the victims. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions urging Kohl to rescind his invitation to Bitburg.

The strongest protest came from the American Jewish community. Jewish lead­ers lobbied Congress and the White House, organized protests, and spoke pub­licly against the visit. By honoring the per­petrators, they said, the U.S. government appeared to dismiss the suffering of mil­lions, causing deep hurt to Holocaust sur­vivors and descendents of victims.

The most poignant event occurred during a White House ceremony in honor of Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s recep­tion of the Congressional Gold Medal. On live TV he addressed the president directly and implored him to cancel the cemetery visit: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS” (New York Times, April 20, 1985).

Opinion polls showed that the Ameri­can public was not quite as adamantly op­posed. Only a slight majority of Americans opposed the visit, whereas a strong minor­ity approved of the effort of German American reconciliation. In Germany, Bit­burg was only one issue in a larger debate about the meaning of May 8, 1945, as de­feat versus liberation. Kohl, although sin­cere in his many statements on German historic responsibilities for Nazi crimes, ad­hered to the conservative predilection of stressing German victimhood. His govern­ment falsely claimed that the Waffen-SS graves only contained young draftees who could not have been involved in atrocities and maintained the popular myth that the Waffen-SS had merely been troops of hon­orable elite soldiers. The chancellory also feared that a retreat from the visit would benefit Soviet attempts at dividing the Western allies over their past enmity.

Kohl received support from about 70 percent of the German public, from ex­pellee organizations, the conservative media, and his party’s nationalist wing. Sharp criticism of the visit came mainly from the leftist opposition, public intellec­tuals, and the liberal media, who de­nounced Kohl’s Vergangenheitspolitik (com­ing to terms with the past policy), alleging that he was attempting to rewrite history in a conservative mode. The White House staff, unable to dissuade Reagan or the Germans from the visit, tried to minimize the scandal’s outfall by adding a stopover at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the program.

Overall, Deaver’s damage control was fairly successful. After the event U.S. opin­ion polls showed a slight majority approv­ing the visit. Deaver left the White House as he had planned before Bitburg and loy­ally carried all responsibility for the scandal with him, leaving the president untar­nished. The painful and embarrassing issue quickly disappeared from media attention. American Jewish leaders realized that iron­ically Bitburg, notwithstanding the severe trauma it had caused, had helped more to raise American consciousness of the Holo­caust than any educational program could have achieved.

In Germany the debate over the past took a decisive turn through the memorial speech of federal president Richard von Weizsacker (CDU) in the Bundestag only three days after Bitburg. He insisted that May 8, 1945, could not be separated from January 30, 1933, the ascendancy of Hitler to power. In what later became the consen­sus interpretation, he acknowledged the suffering of many Germans, but insisted that overall May 8 meant the liberation of Germany and turned out to be for the good of all. “Die Rede” (The Speech), as it came to be known, is arguably one of the most important speeches in postwar Ger­man history and became required reading in German high schools. Weizsacker’s elo­quence quickly overshadowed Kohl’s Bit­burg mess and smoothed the waves of a bitter debate.

Raimund Lammersdorf

See also World War II

References and Further Reading

Funke, Hajo. “Bitburg, Jews, and Germans: A Case Study of Anti-Jewish Sentiment in Germany during May 1985.” New German Critique, no. 38 (1986): 57-72.

Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Levkov, Ilya, ed. Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters in American, German, and Jewish History. New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1987.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. “The Bitburg Controversy.” American Jewish Yearbook 87 (1987): 21-37.