The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith today urged President Reagan to pay remembrance to victims of the Holocaust and visit a concentration camp site when he attends the annual Economic Summit in Bonn in May.
The appeal followed last week’s remarks by an unnamed senior Administration official who told a group of five reporters that “there are other horrors” besides the Holocaust and likened the murder of six million Jews during World War II to the slaying of American Indians.
The official made the remark in explaining why Reagan will most likely not visit a Nazi concentration camp site when he attends the Summit. Reagan’s arrival in May will coincide with the 40th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies.
The unnamed official was quoted as saying, “There are other horrors. We don’t celebrate massacres of Indians, which we perpetrated ourselves, and we should remember that. But we quickly bury that in our conscience.”
The official added, “I’m not condoning what the Germans did or anything else, but what we’re saying is we’re over there for an Economic Summit.” On whether the President will visit a concentration camps, the official said, “I’m not sure that the final, final, final decision has been made.”
The official was then quoted as saying: “Look, its 40 years ago. We all recognize what has happened. Most of the people in Germany today were not even alive when this happened. It’s an atrocity. The German people understand this. They know it. It’s regretable. We can never bring back the dead … Isn’t it time we went forward from here, honoring our dead, remembering what happened, but not constantly bringing it up?”
WIESENTHAL CENTER OUTRAGED
The Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement: “It is an outrage, not only the exercise of poor judgement, but a fundamental error in the sense that when the President of the United States visits a concentration camp he is not offending the German government, but defending humanity and all that is sane in Western civilization.”
The ADL’s associate director and head of its International Affairs Division, Abraham Foxman, recalled that Reagan himself stated that “Holocaust remembrance transcends all considerations of ‘reviving the pain and horror.’ Rather, he stated forcefully and eloquently ‘that infamous episode in history deserves to be remembered only because it teaches us lessons which we must never forget’.”
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