President Reagan’s visit to this concentration camp site today was not on his original itinerary. It was added by his aides only a few weeks ago to defuse the uproar in the U.S. and elsewhere over the President’s decision to visit the military cemetery at Bitburg, a decision taken after Reagan last March flatly rejected a proposal, ostensibly from Chancellor Helmut Kohl, that he visit the Dachau concentration camp site.
The background of his visit here, and its juxtaposition with a same day visit to the Bitburg cemetery where members of the Waffen SS are buried along with other German war dead, triggered plans for a mass protest by Jews and others who felt that under these circumstances, Reagan’s presence at Bergen-Belsen would desecrate the mass grave of the Holocaust victims who perished there.
Hundreds of Jews and many non-Jews from the U.S., Israel and European countries began gathering in nearby Hannover several days ago. Yesterday, a thousand or more heavily armed police forced them to move far from the concentration camp site. At midnight last night, the eight remaining Jewish protestors left, unwillingly but without resistance.
AN ELOQUENT PROTEST
By morning, hours before Reagan and Kohl were scheduled to arrive, there were no protestors within sight or sound of the Bergen-Belsen memorial. Their absence and the silence proved a more eloquent protest — and quite possibly an embarrassment to the official party — than any demonstration that might have been staged.
There was to have been a prayer service–kaddish–for the Holocaust victims at Bergen-Belsen in the presence of Reagan and Kohl. But the 10 Jews required for the minyan were not to be found — either among the protestors or in Hannover, the nearest city with a Jewish community.
The Central Council of West German Jews, headed by Werner Nachmann, boycotted the Bergen-Belsen ceremonies. But they did strive, unsuccessfully, to raise a minyan. As Nachmann told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the boycott was a political gesture but the minyan would be a gesture of respect to the dead martyrs.
As it turned out, the dead did not go un-memorialized. Kaddish was recited at Bergen-Belsen today in the presence of many hundreds of Jews — after Reagan and Kohl had departed for Bitburg.
‘WE SHALL NEVER BE SILENT’
Among the Jewish groups who had turned out to protest and stayed to pray was one headed by Rabbis Avraham Weiss and Ronald Schwarzburg, both of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, N.Y. They arrived Friday and camped in sleeping bags. Weiss said, “We shall never be silent. If we, the Jews do not remember what happened, no one will.”
Another group of American Jews was led by Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress. He said his grandfather had been one of the first prisoners in Dachau. “I and countless other Jews like me cannot accept to see the President of the United States pay tribute to a cemetery where 49 former SS are buried,” he said.
CATHOLIC BISHOPS PROTEST BITBURG VISIT
Jews were not the only ones to protest. The Catholic church in Germany sent out signals of displeasure with the Bitburg choice. Several bishops delivered sermons today critical of it.
A German army officer, Col. Berthold von Stauffenberg, who was assigned — along with U.S. World War II Gen. Matthew Ridgeway — to accompany Reagan and Kohl to Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg was not happy. He said on a television interview last night: “I am an army officer and I was told to go. I obey orders.”
Stauffenberg’s father, Clauss Schenk von Stauffenberg, a Wehrmacht colonel in World War II, was one of the ranking German officers implicated in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler and was tortured and executed.
In Paris today, some 10,000 people, many non-Jewish deportees and former resistance fighters, demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy to protest Reagan’s trip to Bitburg. A similar demonstration by about 500 persons took place outside the U.S. Consultate in Bordeaux.
The Association of Jewish Students in West Germany published an “open letter” to Chancellor Kohl last Friday declaring that Reagan’s visit to Bitburg was a mockery of the victims of Nazism.
The letter, released in Bonn, charged that “the highest representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany are apparently trying to equate things which are incomparable.” It referred to recent legislation in the Bundestag which makes it a civil crime to deny the Holocaust and also to deny that Germans were dispossessed before and after the end of World War II.
The letter also assailed “those who pronounce Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg in one breath,” a reference to the Reagan-Kohl visit to both places. The students took the Bundestag majority to task for refusing to denounce the reunion of former SS officers in the Bavarian town of Nesselwang this week.
EX-SS OFFICERS HOLDING REUNION
About 300 former SS officers of the “Totenkopf” (Deaths Head) division arrived in Nesselwang on Friday. They will be followed next week by hundreds of veterans of the SS “Hitlerjugend” and “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” divisions — names out of Germany’s ghastly past.
According to Mayor Oswald Kainz of Nesselwang, these reunions cannot be banned because they are being held in a private hotel, the Krone. The hotel is owned by a former SS man who is now a neo-Nazi activist.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
