JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Bitburg controversy
On April 11, the White House announced that the Bitburg
cemetery was on Reagan’s itinerary, and that Reagan
and Kohl would lay a wreath there “in a spirit of reconciliation,
in a spirit of forty years of peace, in a spirit of economic
and military compatibility.” Kenneth J. Bialkin, chairman
of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations,
called Reagan’s decision to visit Bitburg but not Dachau
“deeply offensive,” and noted author and Holocaust survivor
Elie *Wiesel, then chairman of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Council, told The New York Times that he could
not believe that the president “would visit a German military
cemetery and refuse to visit Dachau or any other concentration
camp.”
At a press conference on April 18, Reagan made matters
worse by appearing to equate dead German soldiers with
the victims of the Holocaust. “They were victims,” he said of
the soldiers buried at Bitburg, “just as surely as the victims
in the concentration camps.” Reagan’s comments drew angry
responses from American Jewish leaders. Rabbi Alexander
Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, described Reagan’s remarks as a “distortion
of history, a perversion of language, and a callous offense to
the Jewish community.”
A long-scheduled ceremony in the White House on
April 19, awarding, the Congressional Medal of Achievement,
provided the charismatic Wiesel with an unprecedented opportunity
to publicly confront the White House on national
television. Despite fierce pressure to mute the confrontation
with Reagan, whose strong support of Israel was valued, Wiesel
implored him not to go to Bitburg. “That place,” he told
the president during a nationally televised White House ceremony,
“is not your place. Your place is with the victims of
the SS.” Other Jewish leaders similarly called on Reagan to reconsider,
as did 53 U.S. senators on April 15, and 101 members
of the U.S. House of Representatives on April 19 in bipartisan
letters to the president.
Immediately after the public castigation by Elie Wiesel,
the White House announced that Bergen-Belsen had been
added to the president’s German itinerary. Two days later,
Menachem Rosensaft, addressing thousands of Holocaust survivors
gathered in Philadelphia, called on survivors, children
of survivors, and American war veterans to confront Reagan
at the gates of Bergen-Belsen. If the president insisted “on going
to Bitburg,” Rosensaft said, “we do not need him and we
do not want him in Bergen-Belsen.”
Former President Richard M. Nixon, former Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger, and conservative columnist William
F. Buckley, among others, endorsed the Bitburg visit, and
several public opinion polls indicated that only about 52 percent
of Americans were opposed to it. West German officials,
meanwhile, pressured the Reagan Administration to stand
fast. On April 19, Alfred Dregger, the chairman of Kohl’s
parliamentary group, wrote to U.S. senators who had urged
Reagan to change his itinerary that his only brother had died
on the Eastern Front in 1944, and that “If you call upon your
President to refrain from the noble gesture he plans to make
at the military cemetery in Bitburg, I must consider this to
be an insult to my brother and my comrades who were killed
in action.”
Reagan’s insistence on going through with the Bitburg
visit, and his attempt to combine back-to-back tributes to
the Jewish victims of the Holocaust at Bergen-Belsen and
to German soldiers at Bitburg, served primarily to offend the
Jewish community in general and Holocaust survivors and
their families in particular. “President Reagan and Chancellor
Kohl have embarked on a macabre tour, an obscene package
deal, of Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg,” declared Menachem
Rosensaft at a protest demonstration at Bergen-Belsen on
May 5, minutes after the two leaders had left for Bitburg. “Today
we say to them that they can either honor the memory
of the victims of Belsen, or they can honor the SS. They cannot
do both. And by entering Bitburg, they desecrate the
memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of
all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at
Belsen.”
In a short speech at the U.S. Air Force base at Bitburg
on May 5, Reagan said: “Our duty today is to mourn the human
wreckage of totalitarianism, and today, in Bitburg Cemetery,
we commemorated the potential good and humanity
that was consumed back then, 40 years ago.” President Reagan
and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke about
the importance of Holocaust remembrance beside the massgraves
of the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, and
then proceeded to the Bitburg military cemetery where they
participated in a wreath-laying in memory of German soldiers
killed during World War II. The visit to Bergen-Belsen
was widely seen as a desperate attempt by the White House
staff to deflect the controversy over Reagan’s agreement to
join Kohl at Bitburg during the president’s long-planned state
visit to Germany.
In fact, however, as a New York Times editorial observed
on May 6, Reagan’s decision to go through with the
Bitburg visit was a “blunder,” one of the few times that he lost
a confrontation in the court of public opinion. Known as the
great communicator, Reagan found that Wiesel and others
could get their message across to the mass media and the normally
sure-footed White House was reeling. From the perspective
of two decades, the German chancellor attempt to rehabilitate
the reputation of the Waffen-SS has also failed. New
research and public exhibitions in German museums further
link them to the crimes of the Holocaust. It was, however,
regarded by many observers as one of American Jewry’s finest
moment, when in the words of Wiesel, “truth was spoken
to power.”
Bibliography: I. Levkov (ed.), Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters
in American, German and Jewish (1986); D.E. Lipstadt, “The Bitburg
Controversy,” in: American Jewish Year Book, 1987; E. Wiesel, And
the Sea is Never Full (1999), 225–50; C.E. Silberman, A Certain People:
American Jews and Their Lives Today (1985), 360–66.
[Michael Berenbaum (2nd ed.)
728 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3