After taking what he called a “painful walk into the past” at a death camp site, President Reagan laid a wreath Sunday at the Bitburg cemetery, where the German war dead include 49 SS combat soldiers, and later solemnly declared his regret that his decision to go through with the ceremony had reopened “old wounds.”
Before flying to Bitburg, Reagan paid an emotional tribute to Holocaust victims at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Gazing over the mounds of mass burial sites containing more than 50,000 victims, he spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust and sounded the Jewish refrain: “Never again!”
The President, attempting to mollify the many critics of his participation in the Bitburg ceremony, delivered two stirring speeches Sunday, one at Bergen-Belsen on the Holocaust, the other at the U.S. air base at Bitburg after the brief visit to the cemetery, on the theme of reconciliation.
‘A Time of Healing’
“This visit has stirred many emotions in the American and German people, too,” he said at Bitburg. “I have received many letters since first deciding to come to Bitburg cemetery, some supportive, others deeply concerned and questioning, others opposed. Some old wounds have been reopened, and this I regret very much because this should be a time of healing.”
At the concentration camp, sticking closely to a carefully prepared script on a cold, drizzly and bleak day, Reagan spoke passionately of how “hell yawned forth its awful contents” at Bergen-Belsen and of how the crimes of SS troopers who administered Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps “must rank among the most heinous in human history.”
At the air base, before a large crowd of military and civilian personnel, he pointed out that there are fewer than 50 SS combat troops buried among the 1,887 World War II dead at Bitburg and declared, “Others buried there were simply soldiers in the German army.
“How many were fanatical followers of the dictator and willfully carried out his cruel orders?” the President continued. “And how many were conscripts, forced into service during the death throes of the Nazi war machine? We do not know.
“Many, however, we know from the dates on their tombstones, were only teen-agers at the time. There is one boy buried there who died a week before his 16th birthday.”
Reagan said there were thousands of such soldiers to whom Nazism “meant no more than a brutal end to a short life” and added: “We do not believe in collective guilt. Only God can look into the human heart. All these men have now met their supreme judge and they have been judged by him, as we shall all be judged.”
For Reagan and his wife, Nancy, who accompanied him to the Bergen-Belsen ceremony, it was an emotionally draining day. Afterward, aboard Air Force One en route back to Bonn, the President called it “a very moving day for all of us, a day for remembrance and hope.”
With both Houses of Congress and many religious and veterans organizations protesting his cemetery visit, Reagan had sought to quell the criticism by adding the Bergen-Belsen stop to his itinerary. The protests continued up until the visit, though, and the White House did what it could to limit the political damage.
The time of the cemetery visit was reduced from 20 to 8 minutes and an aging American hero of World War II–Army Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway–was brought to Bitburg to participate with Reagan in the wreath-laying ceremony.
When the White House telephoned the 90-year-old retired general at his home in Pittsburgh last Monday to ask him to participate, he reportedly replied: “I’m not seeking anything for myself. But if my President wants me, I will be there.”
The general and the President, preceded by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Gen. Johanner Steinhoff, 71, a badly scarred German hero of World War II, walked shoulder-to-shoulder to the cemetery’s 100-foot tower, which rises above dark crosses made of local slate in commemoration of the dead of two world wars.
At the foot of the tower, only a few feet from several of the SS graves, all four men walked over and touched two large wreaths that had been placed by members of a German military honor guard.
Another honor guard member sounded the German equivalent of “Taps” on a bugle, then the two old generals shook hands and they and their commanders in chief slowly and solemnly walked away.
The actual wreath-laying ceremony, which had caused such outcry in the past few weeks, had lasted only about two minutes.
At Bitburg Air Base, Reagan said that “one of the many who wrote me about this visit was a young woman who had recently been bat mitzvahed.”
“She urged me to lay the wreath at Bitburg cemetery in honor of the future of Germany, and that is what we have done,” he declared. “On this 40th anniversary of World War II, we mark the day when the hate, the evil, and the obscenities ended, and we commemorate the rekindling of the democratic spirit in Germany.”
Kohl, who had invited Reagan to lay the wreath and had held him to the commitment despite the cries of protest in the United States, smiled approvingly as the President spoke of Germany’s spirit and future.
Declaring that the one lesson of Nazism is that freedom must always be stronger than totalitarianism, Reagan said, “That is why the free, democratic Federal Republic of Germany is such a profound and hopeful testament to the human spirit.”
“We cannot undo the crimes and wars of yesterday, nor call the millions back to life,” Reagan said. “But we can give meaning to the past by learning its lessons and making a better future. We can let our pain drive us to greater efforts to heal humanity’s suffering.”
Reagan, using an anecdote from 40 years ago to illustrate that “the hope we see now can sometimes even be glimpsed in the darkest days of the war,” cited a “special story of a mother and her young son living alone in a modest cottage in the middle of the woods.”
He spoke movingly of how the German woman had taken in three young American soldiers lost behind enemy lines, all frostbitten and one badly wounded. Four German soldiers turned up at the house, Reagan said, but, instead of capturing the Americans, befriended them and even showed them how to “get back behind their own lines.”
“They all shook hands and went their separate ways,” the President declared. “That happened to be Christmas Day, 40 years ago. Those boys reconciled briefly in the midst of the war. Surely we allies in peacetime should honor the reconciliation of the last 40 years.”
When asked about the anecdote, White House spokesman Bob Sims said it was based on a January, 1973, Reader’s Digest article but that he had no further information on it.
Sims also said the White House had decided not to release the name of the Jewish woman who had written to Reagan urging him to lay the wreath at Bitburg.
The presence of massive numbers of police reduced the size and intensity of demonstrations at both Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, and those protesters who managed to demonstrate were kept far from the ceremonies and out of Reagan’s sight.
At Bitburg, about 50 people, apparently American Jews, shouted, “You don’t belong there. It can’t be your place, Mr. President. We don’t want you to go in there.”
A sign held by a man and woman declared: “We Came From Michigan, U.S.A., to Remind You They Killed Our Family.”
Outside Bergen-Belsen, demonstrators carried numerous signs, including one in English–”If You Honor the SS, You Kill Their Victims Again”–and one in German–”Reagan’s Sympathy Is Cynical.”
Jewish groups had been denied permission to demonstrate at Bergen-Belsen and they generally boycotted the ceremony. When White House spokesman Larry Speakes was asked how the President reacted to the boycott by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, whose 26 leaders had been invited to attend, he replied, “The Israeli ambassador to Germany was there.”
The Israeli Embassy in Bonn confirmed that Ambassador Yitzhak Benari was among about 350 persons who attended the ceremony at the invitation of the West German government. Kohl, his Cabinet, members of Parliament and other political figures and religious leaders also attended.
Shortly before the ceremony began, five police helicopters and U.S. Marine helicopters carrying the President and his party hovered over the burial grounds, their blades roaring over a large sign saying, “Please Do Not Disturb the Peace of the Dead.”
The actual concentration camp was burned by the British, five weeks after they liberated it on April 15, 1945, to prevent the spread of disease, and the setting now is a vast, peaceful field of heather-covered burial mounds, dotted with clumps of white birch trees.
Into that setting Sunday came not only the helicopters, but a presidential motorcade, hordes of journalists and technicians and hundreds of police and security guards, numerous vans, a mobile television tower and hundreds of feet of television cable.
Reagan, bare-headed and wearing a beige trench coat, and his wife, clad in a black coat and hat, walked through the Bergen-Belsen museum, or “documentation building,” and viewed photographs of Holocaust scenes and examples of Nazi propaganda before going to the burial grounds.
At one point, they stopped for several seconds, transfixed by a large photograph of emaciated bodies stacked up like a pile of wood.
They were accompanied by Michael K. Deaver, Reagan’s long-time aide, who did the advance planning of the European trip. Deaver commented at one point that 14,000 of the victims had died of typhoid and malnutrition after the camp was liberated.
Walking to the camp memorial for the wreath-laying ceremony, the Reagans stopped momentarily to view several of the burial mounds. Flat stones are set into each of the mounds with inscriptions such as “Hier ruher 2,500 Tote. (Here lie 2,500 dead.) April 1945.” The inscriptions are the same on all the mounds except for the number buried, which ranges from 800 to 5,000.
Reagan placed a wreath from “the people of the United States of America” at the camp monument, then spoke softly in solemn tones about “the awful evil started by one man–an evil that victimizes all the world with its destruction.
“For year after year,” Reagan said, “until that man and his evil were destroyed, hell yawned forth its awful contents. People were brought here for no other purpose but to suffer and die. To go unfed when hungry, uncared for when sick, tortured when the whim struck–and left to have misery consume them when all there was around them was misery.”
Reagan aides said that the Bergen-Belsen speech was the President’s opportunity to make a “Gettysburg-type speech” and to persuade skeptics that he fully understands that this was a war like no other war and that the Holocaust was a horror like nothing else modern man has known.
The White House considered the speech so important that Kenneth Khachigian of San Clemente, Reagan’s former chief speech writer and a one-time speech writer for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, was brought back to Washington 10 days ago to write it. Khachigian turned out a powerful and moving message of horror and hope that the President delivered flawlessly and with great solemnity.