Kohl Praises Reagan OK of Cemetery Visit

In an emotional speech Thursday to the West German Parliament, Chancellor Helmut Kohl publicly thanked President Reagan for accepting an invitation to visit a German soldiers’ cemetery next month.

The Parliament soundly defeated a proposal to withdraw the controversial invitation after bitter argument about the issue and Germany’s Nazi past.

“I am grateful to the President of the United States for this noble gesture,” Kohl told Parliament. “I find it most regrettable that this great man, who is a friend of the Germans, has encountered considerable domestic difficulties because of this envisaged noble gesture.”

‘Young Soldiers’

While acknowledging that members of the Waffen SS elite force of the Third Reich are buried at the Bitburg cemetery, Kohl said:

“Many of those young soldiers did not have any chance, like everyone at that time, to evade conscription by the Waffen SS. We are today speaking of soldiers who died at the age of 17, 18 or 19. Their short lives are much shorter than the space of time that has elapsed since their deaths.”

Despite opposing politicians’ heavy criticism of Kohl’s handling of the Reagan visit, a proposal by the Greens party to withdraw the invitation received only 24 votes in the 498-seat Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament.

A proposal by the opposition Social Democrats accusing the Christian Democratic chancellor of “injuring German-American relations” also failed by a vote of 162 to 155. Kohl’s coalition has a majority of 54 seats in the chamber.

There was no sign that West Germany might cancel the cemetery visit, which Kohl originally proposed and which has drawn fire from Jewish and U.S. veterans groups.

Among the graves at Bitburg are 47 belonging to soldiers from the Waffen SS, the combat arm of the elite guard that ran Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps.

Reagan and Kohl have called the visit a gesture of reconciliation between the United States and Germany 40 years after the end of World War 11.

Parliament Debate

However, political opponents said Kohl should have found a cemetery that did not contain graves of SS members. Much of the debate in Parliament on Thursday centered on the extent the Waffen SS had been involved in Nazi war crimes.

Hans-Jochen Vogel, leader of the Social Democrats, said: “It is true that many former members of the Waffen SS today share the horror over the crimes that are forever linked with the name of the SS. That does not alter the fact that the Waffen SS took part in setting up and maintaining concentration camps, and in torture, murder and war crimes.

“The differences can be understood by the Germans, but it is too much to expect it of victims of the SS, or of the people who spent their blood to overcome the SS. The Americans are among those who spent their blood to conquer this terror.”