What the SS Was All About

Time that works to heal wounds can also weaken memories that deserve to be kept strong. President Reagan, who should know better, has suggested that the SS graves in the West German military cemetery that he plans to visit next month are those of very young men, children almost, impressed into service in the last months of the war and free from any association with the crimes of the Nazi era. The President has even suggested that those buried at the Bitburg cemetery, like those who died in the concentration camps during the Nazi period, are equally victims of Hitlerism. To believe this is utterly to miss the point of what the SS was all about and what the controversy over Bitburg involves.

Who is buried at Bitburg is unimportant. It is the SS insignia on certain graves there that are of paramount significance, and it is these that make a presidential pilgrimage to the site inconceivable. The world knows nothing of the SS men buried at Bitburg. It knows more than can ever be comprehended about what the SS stood for and what crimes it committed. The SS graves at Bitburg are the stark symbol of the horror that descended on Europe when it fell under Nazi domination. The SS, in its several roles, embodied the unspeakable evil of that era.

The SS ran the concentration and extermination camps, as everyone knows. It was responsible for mass murder, organized and carried out on a scale unique in history. Jews were the primary though by no means the exclusive victims of the SS. While 6 million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, millions of non-Jews were also deliberately killed along with them. Not all died in the camps. The grisly work of the SS was conducted in the field as well.

By the end of the war the military arm of the SS--the Waffen SS--totaled 39 divisions. These were Hitler’s elite, carefully selected for their loyalty, their fanaticism, their brutality. Where they went terrorism and atrocities followed--in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Russia, in Belgium. It was an SS officer who gave the order near Malmedy in Belgium to slaughter U.S. prisoners of war--” Machen alle kaput .” It was SS men who obeyed that order and murdered more than 200 Americans.

The controversy over Reagan’s planned visit to Bitburg and the homage that he will pay there is hardly only a “Jewish” issue. Neither does it touch only the victims of Nazism and those who fought the war against it. It is above all a moral issue, posing a choice between respect for the enormous tragedy of the near past and the satisfaction of transient political interest. For the President to go to Bitburg would be not just inappropriate but also wrong. For the President to pay his respects near SS gravesites would be not just a blunder but also an insult to humane values.