Principle Gone Wrong

President Reagan says that he wants to “look to the future” and elevate the “spirit of reconciliation” when he journeys to West Germany next month. It’s for this reason that he turned down Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s invitation to visit the site of the Dachau extermination camp, where tens of thousands were mercilessly put to death during the Nazi era, but agreed to offer respects at the Bitburg military cemetery, where German dead from two world wars are interred. To give prominence to the spirit of reconciliation four decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany is a worthy principle. To do so in a context that smacks of gross insensitivity is another matter.

Statecraft is properly conducted with due regard for symbols as well as close attention to substance, which is precisely why Reagan decided on a gesture of homage to the German war dead. The message that it is meant to convey is that the past is past, that the conflict and bitterness of earlier times have given way to friendship to alliance. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with sending such a signal. It is the context in which it will be given that has prompted first surprise and then anger in this country.

Bitburg was a staging area for German tanks thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944, the climactic effort conceived by Hitler to achieve a stalemate against Allied forces in the fighting on the Western front. That engagement is remembered as the greatest and most costly land battle fought by American troops in World War II. It is remembered as well for the murder by German forces of more than 200 American prisoners of war at Malmedy, and the cold-blooded killing of scores of Belgian civilians in the battle zone. Many of those involved in the Malmedy massacre case were never identified. Some were killed in later fighting. It is not inconceivable that some are buried in the Bitburg cemetery. A more appropriate site for a presidential wreath-laying ceremony could have been chosen.

The White House, responding to the public outcry over Reagan’s plans, is hastily moving to revise the presidential itinerary. A visit to Bitburg apparently remains on, but in addition the President probably will do something to pay tribute to Holocaust victims. People who know Reagan say that there is no doubt of his compassion for all those who suffered in the Holocaust. Certainly, too, the President did not deliberately set out to offend American war veterans and others in his effort to signal reconciliation with West Germany. But, calculatedly or not, offense has been given--the product, it can only be assumed, of White House staff work that has been egregiously and incontestably indifferent to what a decent regard for public opinion requires.