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Pravda Condemns Reagan Plan to Visit German War Cemetery

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From Times Wire Services

The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda on Sunday accused President Reagan of kowtowing to Nazi Germany and branded his plans to visit a German military cemetery an “act of blasphemy” that mocks the memory of the millions killed by the Nazis.

The party daily said Reagan’s trip to West Germany next month was originally expected to include a visit to the former Nazi death camp at Dachau, near Munich. Reagan decided against this, saying it would evoke memories of the past, it said.

Instead, it said, he now is scheduled to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at a cemetery near Bitburg, in the western part of West Germany, where 1,800 war dead from World War II and 1,000 from World War I are buried.

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Pravda said the cemetery contains the graves of “quite a few Hitlerite troops,” among them Nazis it said were involved in a massacre of 84 American prisoners near Bitburg.

It said Reagan would in effect be honoring the German war dead by not visiting the graves of any of the Americans killed fighting the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes region where Bitburg is situated. There were 77,000 Allied casualties in that battle.

Pravda said the change in the President’s itinerary was suggested by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

“Who better than Kohl should know that unrepentant Nazis are not only still alive in the FRG (West Germany) but are still actively pushing fascism and revanchism,” it said.

“Revanchism” is Moscow’s term for demands of some German groups for the eventual return of eastern territories lost after the war.

Pravda went on to suggest that Reagan’s decision to avoid Dachau and go to Bitburg could be explained by the scheduled date for the Bitburg ceremony, May 5, because that is the 30th anniversary of West Germany’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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In addition, Pravda said, Bitburg is slated to become a base for U.S.-built cruise missiles later this year. (Actually, under a NATO deployment plan, 96 cruise missiles are due to be sited at Hasselbach, about 30 miles west of Bitburg, in 1986.)

“This is why in the White House they do not want to ‘evoke memories of the past’ and prefer instead to stage this act of blasphemy,” Pravda said.

“Reagan’s bow to the ‘Third Reich’ cannot be seen as anything else but a mockery of the memory of the millions of people who died at the Nazis’ hands.”

The West German newspaper Bild, in today’s editions, criticized the Pravda attack as “an infamous slander.” It said that the dead in the Bitburg graves “certainly wanted neither war nor suffering; they were victims, not perpetrators.”

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