In his innermost thoughts, Ronald Reagan was genuinely friendly toward American Jews. As the recent publications of other former presidents’ private writings and rantings have shown, this is no small thing. The 2003 release of Harry Truman’s diary quoted the 33rd president as writing, “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.” Last year, Jimmy Carter was quoted as telling senior campaign aides prior to the 1980 elections, “If I get back in, I’m going to [expletive] the Jews.” Meanwhile, every newly released Richard Nixon tape seems to carry another antisemitic slur, with the most recent, released in 2002, containing a conversation in which Nixon laments Jewish power with the Rev. Billy Graham.
Yet in the recently published book “The Reagan Diaries” (HarperCollins), edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, Reagan demonstrates impressive compassion for Jewish causes. In his first personal communication with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, for example, Reagan requests that Jewish dissident Anatoly (later Natan) Sharansky be released from the gulag and permitted to join his wife in Israel. In another episode, after addressing an audience of Holocaust survivors and their children, Reagan remarks: “It was an emotional experience for them & for us. I know I choked up a couple of times.” And even when confronting Jewish groups opposing the sale of the Airborne Warning and Control System planes to Saudi Arabia, Reagan strongly affirms his support for Israel: “… it must be plain to them, they’ve never had a better friend of Israel in the W.H. than they have now.”
In these instances, the extreme conviction with which Reagan records his daily thoughts is reassuring. But Reagan’s May 1985 decision to visit the graves of World War II German soldiers in Bitburg, West Germany, offers a very different sort of picture. The president’s certitude about the rightness of the visit— and his stubbornness in the face of public and private outcry — is worth glancing at again in hindsight.
The Diaries’ first mention of Reagan’s decision to visit the Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, which contained the graves of Nazi-SS soldiers, occurred in November 1984. During a meeting with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the G7 Summit in Bonn, Reagan recorded that the Germans feared being “ignored” during the upcoming 40th anniversary of V-E Day. “They suffer a great guilt complex over the Nazi period,” he wrote. “I’m suggesting including them this time & making the occasion one of celebrating when the hatred stopped & peace & friendship began which has continued for 40 yrs.”
In the firestorm that ensued once the upcoming Bitburg visit was leaked to the public in early April 1985, Reagan adamantly held his ground. “There is no way I’ll back down & run for cover,” he wrote. Most disturbingly, the president defended his decision by drawing an obscene analogy between American World War II soldiers and Nazis. “Would Helmut be wrong if he visited Arlington Cemetery on one of his U.S. visits?” he asked.
During this episode, Reagan’s frustration with Jews speaking out against his visit to the Bitburg cemetery was unmistakable. “They [the press] are really sucking blood & finding every person of Jewish faith they can who will denounce me,” he wrote April 18. The following day, Reagan referred to the uproar as his “‘Dreyfus’ case,” refusing his advisers’ calls to cancel the visit. Even first lady Nancy Reagan, renowned for her supportiveness, was described as “uptight about the situation.” Though peeved, Reagan remained undaunted. “I’m not going to cancel anything no matter how much the bastards scream,” he wrote.
When it ultimately came time for the May 5 visit, Reagan’s angry defensiveness returned to the cool conviction that otherwise colors most of his writing. After declaring that “we must never forget & we must pledge, ‘never again’” during a morning visit to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Reagan arrived at the Kolmeshöhe Cemetery to a large crowd of German onlookers, most of whom he believed to be approving. During a brief ceremony, an American and German general from World War II each laid a wreath at the cemetery monument. When the two unexpectedly shook hands at the close of the ceremony, Reagan called it a “truly dramatic moment.”
Polls later showed that 59% of Americans supported Reagan’s visit — up from 49% before his trip. “I always felt it was the morally right thing to do,” he wrote.
While Reagan’s own account of his decision to visit Bitburg is a deeply disturbing read, it is generally considered the exception in an otherwise positive record on Jewish-relevant issues. “I think it was an episode — a sad episode,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman. “The Jewish community’s attitude toward Reagan was that he was a friend, and certainly a friend of Israel. He could have been a greater friend, but [the Bitburg visit] did not tarnish him significantly.”
According to Foxman, the Bitburg visit was far more damaging to Germany’s image among American Jews. “It backfired on Germany,” he said. “We saw that they were impatient to achieve normalcy, without understanding that we can never be normal. We can have relations. We can have understanding. But it can never be normal, certainly not as long as survivors and perpetrators [of the Holocaust] are around.” For this reason, it was the German government — and not Reagan — that undertook efforts to repair relations with the Jewish community after the Bitburg controversy, Foxman said.
If Reagan’s visit to Bitburg soured relations with the American Jewish community, the president never seemed to notice. While Reagan continued recording his efforts to liberate Soviet Jewry, secure reparations for Holocaust victims and engage domestic Jewish groups, he never wrote of Bitburg — or the furor it engendered — again.
Eric Trager is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
Copyright © 2013, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us
Tracing the Jewish Origins of the Holy Ghost
Ethical Kosher Seal Stalls Amid Orthodox Opposition
Baby Boomers’ Rocky Road to Jewish Love
'War' With Ultra-Orthodox at Kotel? Bring It On
You've successfully signed up!
With all due respect to the sincerity of Walter Pfaeffle, yes, it is "obscene" to draw an analogy between American World War II soldiers and German soldiers. Why? Despite the fact that both were drafted into their respective armies and had to serve, there is a great deal of fresh evidence that proves the extent to which the Wehrmacht assisted the SS in rounding up Jews, sometimes engaging in Aktionen themselves. Far from being apolitical, the Wehrmacht was imbued with Nazi ideology and Nazi indoctrination that was part and parcel of their training. There is a famous photograph of Wehrmacht troops about to board a train that will transport them to the Polish front and scrawled on the side, apparently in chalk, is a caricature of a Jew and the words, "We're traveling to Poland to thrash the Jews." In October 1941, Walter von Reichenau, commander of the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army Group, appealed to his men in the language of Nazi racial doctrine: "The essential goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is a complete destruction of its power instruments and the eradication of the Asiatic influence on the European cultural sphere." In November 1941, General von Manstein, who remained an unrepentant Nazi ideologue until his death wrote, "Judaism constitutes a mediator between the enemy in the rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army…" and "The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all." Statements as these were not merely wartime propaganda and frontline encouragement – they were an intrinsic, core element of Nazi ideology and weltanschauung. As to the SS, well few will argue that that they were enthusiastic volunteers who proudly proved their ancestral Aryan "purity" – and we are all familiar with what their primary tasks were when they served in Einsatzgrupppen A, B, C, and D as well as at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Majdanik, Treblinka, Belsec, and elsewhere. Finally, to respond to Walter Pfaeffle's query as to why we call the youth who served in the final months of the war as "Nazi" soldiers, we do so because so many of them were either still in the Hitler Jugend or were recent "graduates". Having been brainwashed for years, they lived the party line with every fiber of their being and were viewed as SS heir apparents. They did wear Waffen SS uniforms and Wehrmacht uniforms and put up some of the most fanatical resistance to advancing American and Russian troops. They were cannon fodder in Berlin but saw action in villages and engaged in some of the worst cruelties that only underage boys with an underdeveloped or warped sense of morality and an inability to distinguish right from wrong could carry out. Some of these "excesses" included the execution of Jews who had escaped from death transports and the shooting of rural farmers and townsfolk who, as the noose tightened, no longer agreed to cooperate with Hitler's war aims. President Reagan, one of my favorite presidents, did not understand this and he sought reconciliation in his own erroneous way, refusing to accept the fact that the cemetery was not simply a cemetery for soldiers just doing their patriotic duty, but that it also contained the remains of men – or boys – who belonged to one of history's most evil organizations.
Why is is "obscene" to daw an analogy between American World War II soldiers and German soldiers? Both were drafted and therefore had no choice but to serve. And why call them "Nazi" soldiers? It it not a well-known fact that in the final months of the war boys were drafted into regular army and SS units? The teenage boys buried at Bitburg may have worn Waffen SS uniforms but that doesn't make them Nazis. President Reagan understood this. Walter Pfaeffle
I am well aware of the crimes committed by regular German army units, as referred to by Lowell D. Blackman. The "Wehrmacht-Ausstellung" and a recent film based on this exibition make this clear. I differ with his generalizations. I content that the vast majority of the millions of underage and adult German conscripts never committed such heinous acts. Yet after the war they were made to feel guilty for having worn the "Nazi" uniform. My father's brother, a communist, was arrested in 1939 and put into a concentration camp. Following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis pulled him out and made him fight on the Eastern front. Does that make him a "Nazi" soldier? As for those child soldiers, I suspect that only a small minority fits Lowell Blackman's description of fanatical and brainwashed youths. Many simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, the degree of indocrtination often depended on where you lived. I was eight only years old when the war was over, but I remember that the Hitler Youth leaders in my small Southern community were selected on the basis of their leadership qualities and moral character. They would have been leaders under any regime. When Chancellor Helmut Kohl asked President Reagan to pay his respects to the fallen soldiers buried at Bitburg, he did so because a large part of Kohl's constituency were men and women who had served in the Wehrmacht. President Reagan understood this. He knew instinctively how to differenciate. He refused to act "politically correct." To this I say: Chapeau!
WW II was essentially a religious war.
Both Walter Pfaeffle and Lowell Blackman's reactions are worth considering, I suppose proof would be in statistics: if someone could Prove how many of the young conscripts genuinely believed in Nazi ideology and "followed up" on it, "took orders", and how many did it out of fear. Blackman has statistics, Pfaeffle has anecdotes, both men are erudite and sincere whose thoughts and writings are deserving of attention. My gross disagreement with them is on Ronald Reagan the politician...the person. His motives may have been sincere but his orientation towards the poor...so many of whom died fighting for their respective countries...was abhorrent, as the New York Times recently pointed out in an Op-ed article recently. And if I may be a bit blunt...it seems a later comment, of one Jack Thomsen, simply doesn't deserve to be printed, as anti-semitic tripe...can hardly share the spotlight with erudite comments as noted above. And in the Jewish Forward no less. A "shanda!.
While it is true that at the end of the War young boys were drafted into the SS (e.g. leftist writer Gunther Grass) it STILL must be defined as a criminal organization and President Reagan's decision to visit a cemetery with SS soldiers buried therein must be considered a wrong one. That being said, one wonders where those who protested the loudest at the time (and now) were when Jesse Jackson was campaigning for their presidential candidates and when it was disclosed that Hillary Clinton's New World Foundation was making contributions to PLO fronts in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, giving the PLO legitimacy in those localities and freeing other PLO funds to purchase arms and ammunition.
Far from a "mensch" Ronald Reagan was a callous ideologue quite content to exploit racism for his own ends and one of the worst Presidents we've suffered with - right down there with the Bushes. When Governor of California it was revealed he had placed a restrictive covenant on the deed of his home - no Jews or Blacks allowed. His continual reference to "welfare queens" buying vodka with their food stamps was only one part of his ugly attack on the poor and every program designed to help them. This was part and parcel of his open contempt for anyone and any program that did not further his limited and cramped vision for enriching the upper classes and corporations and to hell with the rest, a program we've been suffering under for thirty-some years. The clearest example of his racism was the location he chose for kicking open his 1980 Presidential campaign - Philadelphia, MS, the small town where Civil Rights workers Schwermer, Chaney, and Goodman were murdered. There he spoke on the sanctity of State's Rights. What a mensch! Immediately afterwards, his Presidential bid was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Reagan waited nearly a month before rejecting their support, long enough for them to know that indeed he welcomed it. His role during the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was that of a bit player. It was Gorbachev we should be thanking not Reagan. Gorby was working toward the implementation of his reforms long before Reagan ever sat in the White House and it was those reforms that brought about the end of the Cold War, and which led, inadvertently and inevitably, toward the fall of the Communism and the Soviet Union. And during that period Reagan was very suspicious of it all. It can be very well argued that if not for Reagan and other ideologues like him we may very well have reached that same end years earlier. And, no, Reagan's Star Wars program did not push Gorbachev towards his reforms. He'd been planning such since at least 1977. The Soviets would have been quite capable, if they so chose, of tightening their belts (and the screws) to match us in any military build-up, as they did in the aftermath of WW2, from which they emerged horribly battered and nearly on their knees.
One reason so many Americans, even bitter political opponents, now retrospectively admire Ronald Reagan is that more and more research has revealed what an act his "genial, bumbling, easily influenced hulk" act was, and how much solid purpose and potency lay behind it. He was a mensch. It now appears that Reagan had read and thought (and written, without assistance) far more energetically about the trials and tribulations of modern times than he was given credit for by those contemporaries who couldn't get beyond the image of a dumb actor being told what lines to say and where to stand. Reagan exploited this patronising attitude from the governing elite instead of railing self-damagingly against it like Nixon, another outsider. One of RWR's most famous sayings was that it's amazing how much you can achieve if you let some other fellow take the credit. The Bitburg decision, and the tenacity with which he stuck to it without parading resentment in public, is typical of Reagan's subtle, "Teflon-president" way of knowing what he wanted and getting it without leaving lasting offence. The marriage of principle, optimism and shrewdness in Reagan's years at the helm (though not infallible- he may have been moving into senile dementia in his last thwo or three years, the Iran-Contra time) on the whole served him, and the Republic, well. He taunted his communist ideological enemies, yet achieved a soft landing from the Cold War without military exchanges and with closer US-Russian ties as a bonus: a feat prophets in 1945 or 1962 would have deemed impossible. Reagan looks more of a giant than ever in comparison with his successors, who have been all calculation or all stubbornness, with no intellectual and moral fibre behind it. Reagan played the endgame of his era far more adroitly than the Bushes and Clintons have handled the peace dividend he left them. Bitburg was part of the endgame diplomacy surrounding the trickiest side issue of collapsing communism: moving towards reuniting Germany while keeping it strong but pacific as the big gun of Europe. West Germany needed a further dose of reassurance, instead of forever being beaten up as the Nazi villain. Far more important matters were at stake in 1985 than Abe Foxman's lovingly cultivated professional outrage. Reagan was a fascinating, elusive but effective leader- easily the most intriguing president since FDR, and I would say the greatest of the 20th century.
Mr. Trager might do well to read what Reagan wrote about this visit in his autobiography, "An American Life." It gets into detail his philosophy on the issue of this visit, and the fact that most of the soldiers interned at Bitburg weren't Nazis... as, indeed, most of the German armed forces were not. Germany had a long-standing professional military, and Hitler was (amazingly) the democratically-elected head of state, whom they HAD to serve, by their oaths before God. Many of them would later realize that this was madness, and there was at least one famous attempt to assassinate Hitler, led by a senior German colonel. We can honor those who fought and died because their leaders pushed them into war. They didn't make the choice. They simply fought and died. The few SS soldiers in the cemetery didn't change the fact that the majority were honorable soldiers.
A NOTE FROM SOMEONE WHO NOTICED With regard to Trager’s article of October 10 entitled “Reconsidering Reagan at Bitburg”, I wish to offer a few thoughts. The first is why that subject is even a topic of interest in the first place since outside of a spoof blog, FauxNewsNetwork.com, there’s been no real mention of it in years, the 20th anniversary of Mr. Reagan’s visit, for instance, was 2005. That said, Mr. Trager is not so much untruthful as he is incomplete in a number of his comments, and just haunting with one other. I’ll explain. He mentions Richard Nixon’s “Anti-Semitic Slur” in a tape involving a conversation with the Reverend Billy Graham; there were, alas, many such exchanges and, with the Reverend readily in agreement. My source here is Mr. Graham’s public admission and apology many years later. Still no mention of such Republican rants would be complete without reference to Mr. Nixon’s tirade on the Mai Lai massacre. In the president’s words the only problem was “those dirty rotten New York Jews”; in the eyes of less right wing folks like myself the problem with the Mai Lai massacre was that it was well . . . a massacre. Mr. Trager mentions Reagan’s kind words regarding Jewish interests, which, by the by, politically coincided with his own interests, and often just happened to precede election campaigns. It was after his second and, of course, last election that Mr. Reagan made his Bitburg plans when he would never again need a single Jewish vote at the ballot box. President Reagan’s “obscene analogy” comparing the SS at Bitburg to our troops at Arlington was absurd, as well as obscene, with the disclaimer that the SS buried at Bitburg (there were dozens) were according to Mr. Reagan mostly young ones. It almost makes one want to break into song, say “Young SS, old SS, feel alright on a warm Uber Alles night”. And regarding the comment “I’m not going to cancel my trip no matter now much the bastard’s scream”, that was even more regrettable because it was said to close advisor John Deaver moments after Ellie Wiesel had left Reagan’s office pleading with him to just that, and reconsider the trip. The source for this is John Deaver this past summer at the last public appearance of his life, and one could tell he (Mr. Deaver) had agonized over the comment itself, and at whom (Mr. Wiesel) it was obviously directed. The reference to the polls, that less than half of Americans approved of the trip before the president went but over 59% no longer had objections to his honoring Bitburg, and by extension the SS buried there, once the trip was made, should caution us, not calm us and particularly should give the Jewish community pause. If it doesn’t, they need to read some history. And speaking of history, we hear so often that during the Holocaust, so much of the world j u s t d i d n o t s e e m t o n o t i c e; they seemingly collaborated by their inertia. How fitting then that the lead of Mr. Trager’s conclusion of this defense of the indefensible, begins thusly “If Reagan’s visit to Bitburg soured relations with the American Jewish community, t h e p r e s i d e n t n e v e r s e e m e d t o n o t i c e”. As a post script, and for the record, so many on the right so regularly counter disapproval of the attitudes of two sitting presidents with the mention of Jesse Jackson’s imbecillian “Hymie Town” remark but again that’s just a part of the story. Jackson did, in fact, publicly apologize and worked actively, very actively to help Joe Lieberman be elected as VP in the 2000 election. Regrets from Reagan or Nixon, for that matter, seem never to have appeared. Also for the record, apologies to me personally for Jackson’s remarks saying that he in no way represented what they thought or stood for were made by a number of black acquaintances. But that noted, and again on a personal level, no Reagan or Nixon devotee, for that matter, ever showed any similar class with any such expression of regrets to me or any other Jew with whom I’ve spoken. Maybe in your words, Mr. Trager, they like their hero, Ronald Reagan, “never seemed to notice”.
I just found this comment space or I would have posted earlier. This revisionist history is unbelievable to me. I wish Mr. Trager had talked to people who were adults at the time and remember this event. I remember it vividly. Ronald Reagan will forever be tainted to me and every Jew with a memory of the Holocaust. Trager focuses on the issue of Reagan's going to Bitburg, and is correct in saying that was an issue before his trip. After his trip, the issue became what Reagan DID at Bitburg, not whether he should he have gone there. Trager unaccountably ignores what Reagan did at Bitburg, but I will never forget it. He had the Chutzpah to forgive the Nazis. Surely other readers will remember this. Reagan had no right to forgive the Nazis. They didn't murder his whole family. They didn't murder 1 1/2 million American children--it was 1 1/2 million European Jewish children. Trager and American Jews like him have no idea what it's like to see your family murdered or to grow up with no family at all. He has no right to forgive Reagan, and Reagan had no right to forgive one Nazi atrocity. We will never forgive and never forget, G-d help us.
I really dont think that reagans visit to Germay was really that bad thats like saying its bad for the chanceller to come to an american cemetery... It's really not that bad.
Grif, you're wrong about Reagan's house deed. First of all, it placed no restrictions on selling to Jews, only to Blacks (in fact, the next owner of that house was a man named Isidore Siskin, who I have to assume was Jewish). Not that it's much comfort to Blacks, but it's entirely possible Reagan and his wife never even saw the deed - deeds are usually handled by laywers and the like.