Deborah Lipstadt describes the Bitburg event this way:
On May 5, 1985, during a state visit to West Germany, President Ronald Reagan stopped for a few minutes at a small cemetery outside the city of Bitburg. What should have been a routine visit of little concern to anyone except perhaps the residents of the area, had by that point become a major international event.The visit to a war cemetery was supposed to be a symbol of reconciliation between the former Second World War adversaries, who of course had long been allies by then. It was planned to be similar to an event that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had previously held with French President François Mitterrand. Kohl was trying to promote something like the idea that Von Weizsäcker had initiated that the upcoming 40th anniversary of V-E Day was something that Germans could celebrate as being a liberation as well as a defeat. Or as Lipstadt put it, “Kohl seemed to be intent on marking the occasion as a victory of democracy over fascism and not as the defeat of Germany.”
The imbroglio over the visit to the Bitburg cemetery - which in itself lasted no more than ten minutes and during which Reagan said nothing publicly - threatened to seriously affect American- German relations, be a spur to anti-Semitism, politically alienate American Jews from the Reagan administration, and, indeed, color the way in which Reagan's entire presidency would be viewed in history. For over a month the details of the visit and the debate over whether it should proceed as planned occupied the pages - often the front pages - of virtually every major American newspaper. [my emphasis] (2)
The problem became that the graves in Bitburg contained not just the remains of regular Wehrmacht troops, but also 49 graves of members of the Waffen-SS, military formation that waS part of the SS, which was declared postwar to be a criminal organization. The SS was a part of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and was mainly composed of volunteers. And the conduct of the Waffen-SS in the war had often been seriously criminal. (Some regular Wehrmacht soldiers were assigned to Waffen-SS during the war and were not themselves the usual volunteer members.)
Among Reagan’s most important advisers were Michael Deaver, who was planning the trip and also struggling with his own serious alcohol problems. Reagan’s wife Nancy was heavily involved with astrology at the time and was closely consulting with her astrologer about exactly what to do about the visit. Having two of his closest confidants being less than closely focused on reality wasn’t helpful to Reagan, who already in the 1984 Presidential campaign was displaying symptoms of his Alzheimer’s disease.
The whole thing was a political fiasco for Reagan at home, who received a lot of deserved criticism from many sides, including from Elie Wiesel, one of the most prominent members of the US Jewish community at the time. As Lipstadt also notes, “President Reagan, in a group press interview, described the SS men buried at Bitburg as ‘victims of Nazism also .... They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.’ … Reagan went on to describe the SS men [falsely] as ‘young soldiers that were conscripted, forced into military service in the closing days of the Third Reich."
A truly cringeworthy moment. And in those days, prominent Republican leaders like then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, were willing to criticize a Republic President. To show how politically toxic the visit was, “Former president Richard Nixon and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger were among the few prominent Republicans to openly support the Bitburg visit.” (Lipstadt, my emphasis)
The event became a flashpoint in German and American memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust. When it became widely known that 49 members of Waffen-SS member were buried there, a firestorm of controversy erupted. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon calls it "the seminal symbolic disaster of an administration that placed great store in symbolism." (3)
It was also a good example of how symbolic issues can turn out to have substantive repercussions.
In itself, the incident was symbolic rather than substantive. It was a significant even in Reagan's Presidency because symbolism was extraordinarily important to the actor-President's leadership style. More generally, the controversy was important in setting a tone for how the heritage of World War II should be interpreted in America and in Germany, and also for the Kohl Administration's attempts to assert a more prominent role for Germany in the world.
Some observers credit the Bitburg controversy as a major factor giving rise to the Historikerstreit, or historians' fight, in Germany, beginning in 1986. In the Historikerstreit, conservative journals like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung opened their pages to historians attempting to make "mainstream" arguments for interpretations of the Third Reich previously identified only with the far right. Most notorious was historian Ernst Nolte's argument that the Russians were to blame for the mass killings of Jews at Auschwitz and other death camps. (?!?)
Background of the Bitburg Visit
The ceremony at Bitburg had been suggested by Kohl in 1984. It was inspired by a reconciliation ceremony he had held with French President Francois Mitterrand at the World War I battlefield of Verdun, where both French and German soldiers were buried. Kohl and Mitterrand had joined hands before the soldiers' graves.
Duplicating this ceremony with the Americans presented difficulties. For one, there are no cemeteries where both German and American soldiers are buried, because American policy is generally to return soldiers' remains to the United States
But the presence of the Waffen-SS dead sparked the greatest controversy. The SS (Schutzstaffel, or "protective detachment"), also known as the Blackshirts, were an elite Nazi group headed by Heinrich Himmler. The SS operated concentration and death camps, and its members were infamous for their sadism, fanaticism and murderous brutality.
The SS grew into a large, complex organization. The Waffen-SS was an SS military formation attached to regular military units and, unlike most of the SS, included some conscripts along with volunteers, i.e., some soldiers from the regular army (Wehrmacht) were assigned to Waffen-SS units. Nevertheless, the Waffen-SS earned its own notoriety. It was the First SS Panzer Division who, on December 17, 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge, had murdered 71 unarmed American prisoners of war in the Belgian town of Malmedy. Malmedy was the worst massacre of U.S. POWs during World War II.
Bitburg Becomes an Issue
The controversy broke in April, 1985, when Reagan's itinerary for his trip to Germany for the G-7 economic summit was announced. The conservative veterans' group, the American Legion, publicly stated, "we are terribly disappointed" at the planned Bitburg visit. Author and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel publicly expressed his surprise and dismay.
The White House staff's reaction to the public brouhaha is fascinating. As reported by Cannon:
Some of [the White House] officials complained that the press, and particularly Jewish reporters, were blowing up the story in an effort to discredit Reagan. As [director of communications] Pat Buchanan saw it, the liberal media were always seeking an issue upon which they could seize to damage a popular president. He urged resistance, to the Jews and to the media. "Buchanan argued for a harder line, a bigger gesture, a clearer defense of the new Germany and virtually an amnesty for the Third Reich," said [public relations chief Michael] Deaver. ...Nancy Reagan ... wanted to end the controversy by cancelling the Bitburg stop. [my emphasis]Reagan stubbornly refused to cancel because of the commitment he had made to Kohl, a commitment the Chancellor reinforced with two phone calls that month. When Reagan hesitated about his plans, writes British historian Michael Balfour, "Kohl ... obstinately refrained from providing him with a pretext" for cancelling the cemetery visit. (4)
After Reagan had already decided to continue his Bitburg plans, Buchanan and White House aide Ed Rollins met with Elie Wiesel and five prominent Jewish Republicans, ostensibly to consider their objections. All six, says Cannon, argued that the visit "would be morally and ethically improper."
Buchanan, also impassioned..., told the Jews that they were "Americans first," as if there was something un-American about opposing the Bitburg ceremony. But what enraged the Jews [in the meeting] was not so much what Buchanan said but what they observed he had written over and over again on his notebook: "Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews."Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, himself a disabled World War II veteran, publicly called the visit a "mistake." Fifty-three Senators announced their opposition to the visit. Protestant evangelist Billy Graham asked the President to find an alternative site. Prominent Jewish community leader Elie Wiesel, receiving an award at a ceremony scheduled before the Bitburg flap, made a dramatic appeal to Reagan: “May I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
Reagan increased the controversy by declaring that the Waffen-SS soldiers buried in Bitburg "were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."
To top it all off, White House public relations chief Michael Deaver, struggling with his own alcoholism, had to negotiate with Nancy Reagan's San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley over the details of scheduling the trip. Having two of his closest confidants being less than closely focused on reality wasn’t helpful to Reagan, who already in the 1984 Presidential campaign was displaying symptoms of his Alzheimer’s disease.
Reagan made his cemetery stop in Bitburg, reluctantly adding a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp for balance. Cannon notes, "Reagan's moving address at Bergen-Belsen would prove [to be] the last great commemorative speech of his presidency." (Yes, when you wind up at a ceremony honoring SS Nazis, it helps to offset it with something not quite so Elon-Musk-y.)
But, on the whole, the Bitburg event was a public-relations disaster, angering even veterans' organizations who normally were Reagan’s enthusiastic supporters.
Alvin Rosenfeld called attention to one strange element in the way Reagan tried to frame his Bitburg visit. In a press conference in March before his trip, he explained to a reporter’s question on its purpose, he replied:
... I felt that, since the German people have very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way, and the, they do, they have a feeling and a guilt feeling that’s been imposed upon them. And I just think it’s unnecessary. (5)Rosenfeld articulates why that was strange. For one thing, as he politely puts it, that comment registered a “note of historical ignorance.”
[I]t was common knowledge at the time that there were still large numbers of Germans alive who fought in the war and even larger numbers who remember it (knowledge never denied in Germany itself). Why, then, did the president of the United States not seem to know it? And if he did know it, what moved him to declare the opposite to be the case? Why, one wondered, was he so obviously intent on distancing Germany from its recent past?Someone who was 20 in 1945 at the end of the war would have been 60 in 1985.
The notion that “unnecessary” guilt feelings have been “imposed upon” the Germans is similarly wrong-headed and goes against the grain of common morality, which affirms that those who are guilty of wrongdoing should in fact feel guilty. [Which presumably is not an esoteric observation!] Indeed, if they deny such feelings or acknowledge them only because someone else imposes them, then the guilty will never begin to acknowledge their misdeeds, let alone atone for them. For President Reagan to relieve the consciences of the guilty by suggesting that it is unfair to reawaken memory of the war years was another startling instance of presidential rhetoric gone astray. [my emphasis]Reagan in that context claimed he wanted to take what Barack Obama would later call a “look forward, not backward” attitude toward the topic:
For a variety of reasons, many Americans have only scant knowledge of history. They also have difficulties relating to it, most of all if it is someone else’s history, and especially if it is painful or otherwise upsetting. In looking to disconnect from recent German history, the American president probably did represent some of his countrymen’s inclinations as well. One of President Reagan’s aides in the White House, questioned about the prospects of a visit to a former concentration camp, recalled the president saying, “You know, I don’t think we ought to focus on the past, I want to focus on the future, I want to put that history behind me.” [Look Forward Not Backward!] Another Administration official explained, “The President was not hot to go to a camp. You know, he is a cheerful politician. He does not like to grovel in a grisly scene like Dachau.”There were certainly grisly events that took place at the Dachau concentration camp. I’ve toured it on two different occasions. It’s a grim and somber place to visit it. But I wouldn’t describe visiting the professionally curated version of it now as a historical site would be like “grovel[ing] in a grisly scene.” It just seems like an odd way to describe it. It’s not like they are holding sadomasochistic re-enactments of beatings and executions there.
But the famously telegenic Reagan really managed to do a lot of political self-harm with that whole production. Rosenfeld:
Listen to the following words from the president’s news conference of April 18, 1985, and recall that only a month before he declared that he did not want to visit a Nazi concentration camp for fear of reawakening old passions: “I think that there is nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” If ever a public utterance was designed to reawaken old passions, this one was, for in two simple sentences it succeeded in leveling the distinctions between those murdered in the camps and the comrades-in-arms of their murderers; at the same time, the president’s words echoed a Nuremberg-style defense of the murderers, who appear in President Reagan’s apologetic view as reluctant agents of somebody else’s aggressive will. [my emphasis]I’m sorry. But it’s one thing to recognize German men were drafted into the Wehrmacht and that Hitler’s Nazi regime wound up being a horrible disaster for Germans. But to say that even Wehrmacht soldiers – much less Waffen-SS ones - “were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps” is both bonkers and ugly. It’s worth remembering that in the Nuremberg Trial and in other prosecutions related to the Third Reich, the legal standard applied was whether they had violated laws that were in effect at the time of the acts committed. No comparable legal standards were applied by German authorities to those sent to concentration camps. (Or in 2025 to those the Trump Administration has recently sent without trial and against a US court order to a concentration camp in El Salvador.)
And some of both officers and ordinary soldiers in the Wehrmacht were involved in serious war crimes. (6)
Reagan also indulged in a non-trivial bit of historical revisionism in describing the Third Reich as “one man’s totalitarian dictatorship.” By that standard, even war criminals convicted at Nuremberg like Germann Güring and Ernst Kaltenbrunner were “victims,” as well. As Rosenfeld observes:
Nazism was a mass phenomenon, and in both large and small ways involved vast numbers of Germans over the course of the war. In attributing the evil of Nazism to Hitler alone, and, inexplicably, by never referring to him by name [on that occasion], President Reagan was reducing history to caricature, to a celluloid image of pervasive, if ineffable, malevolent force. ...The historian Wolfgang Benz more recently described the Bitburg controversy this way:
Hitler appears in President Reagan’s view as a terrifying but vague embodiment of evil, and Hitler’s soldiers, “the young men” in their graves, as his innocent and unwilling victims. As for the real victims—mourned by President Reagan as those “Never to hope. Never to pray, never to love. Never to heal. Never to laugh. Never to cry”—they are sentimentalized out of mind. [my emphasis]
Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl created a political debacle when he celebrated his outlook on coming to terms with the past. At the Bitburg military cemetery, where next to fallen soldiers of the Wehrmacht rest fallen soldiers of the Waffen-SS, he and US President Ronald Reagan had tried to invoke the advantage of a supposed "zero hour" that was supposed to have struck on May 8, 1945 and relegated everything that had happened before that to a closed past. (7)No wonder the Trumpistas want to dictate a Stephen Miller version of “patriotic” history that omits telling and embarrassing moments like Bitburg and embraces instead rightwing revisionist versions of history.
[This post incorporates some of the text I originally published in a blog post in 2004: D-Day, 1985. <https://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/2004/05/d-day-1985.html>]
Notes:
(1) Reagan visits German war cemetery. <https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/05/this-day-in-politics-may-5-1985-565776>, May 5, 1985. Politico 05/05/2018).
(2) Lipstadt, Deborah (1987): The Bitburg Controversy. The American Jewish Year Book Vol. 87, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23603943>.
(3) Cannon, Lou (1991): President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, 486-492, 573-588. (New York; Simon & Schuster.
(4) Balfour, Michael (1992): Germany: The Tides of Power, 225. New York: Routledge.
(5) Rosenfeld, Alvin (2011): The End of the Holocaust, 17-21. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
(6) Hartmann, Christian (2010): Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42. Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag.
Institut für Sozialforschung (2002): Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941-1944. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS Verlagsges [sic].
Bartov, Omer (2001): The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. New York: Palgrave.
(7) Benz, Woflgang (2025): Zukunft der Ernnerung. Das deutsche Erbe und die Kommende Generation. Munich: Verlagsgesellschaft. My translation to English.
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