Reagan Believed Ss Men Buried at Bitburg Had Aided Prisoners

Former President Ronald Reagan claims that when he visited the German military cemetery in Bitburg in 1985, he was convinced some of the SS men buried there had been executed for trying to shield concentration camp inmates “from the ovens” and were buried in prisoner uniforms.

In a 1989 exchange of letters with Kalman Sultanik, vice president of the World Jewish Congress, the former president insists on the veracity of his account, though he admits he has no proof. The letters were made public a few weeks ago.

Reagan attributed his information to his German hosts. Sultanik, himself a death camp survivor, concluded that the president had been shamefully duped by them.

Reagan came under fire at home and abroad for visiting a burial place where members of the dreaded Nazi elite corps that ran the death camps were interred along with other German war dead. His visit caused particular anguish to Holocaust survivors and their families.

Sultanik, who served on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council during the eight years of Reagan’s presidency, first wrote to him in March 1989. He expressed his concern that the former president’s depiction of the Bitburg episode in his upcoming autobiography could inadvertently abet the growing coterie of revisionists who claim the Holocaust never occurred.

Reagan wrote back: “As for Bitburg itself, I did some research on my own and learned that, yes, there were some SS troopers buried there, but a number of them were buried in prisoner uniforms. They had been executed for trying to shield inmates from torture and the ovens.”

CITES GERMAN SOURCES

Sultanik replied that this claim, “not found to my knowledge in any historical literature of the Holocaust, raises a very disturbing issue.”

In his response, Reagan conceded that “there is no documented evidence regarding the SS troopers buried in prisoners uniforms that I know of.”

But the former president said he was convinced that was the case.

“German officials having to do with my visit were the source of this information,” Reagan wrote. “It came up in their description and history of Bitburg cemetery, and they even gave me the names of the few SS men who had been so treated.”

Sultanik pursued the subject, writing to the ex-president that exhaustive research and consultations with eminent historians failed to yield an iota of evidence that any SS personnel intervened on behalf of Jews or other inmates.

Reagan said in his third and final letter that while he “can’t provide any source of the stories of SS troopers buried in prisoner uniforms,” he was still convinced such accounts were true.

Reagan cited several informants, including one he identified as a cemetery employee, “who actually pointed out the headstone of one of the troopers who had been buried in the prisoner uniform.”

Sultanik said he believed the president, “seeking to act out of good motives, was ensnared by an unspeakable distortion of history by his German hosts.”