SS War Veterans Hold Reunion, Support Reagan’s Graves Visit

NESSELWANG, West Germany — Most of the 300 Nazi SS veterans attending a reunion here support President Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery where some of their comrades are buried, one of the veterans said Friday.

“We need the symbol of reconciliation,” said Josef Burgmuedler. “And it’s also important that (Reagan) stuck to his decision.”

Burgmuedler, 67, was one of several veterans who ventured out of the closed-door gathering and agreed to speak to reporters.

Reagan’s Bitburg visit was a popular topic of conversation among the veterans and most of the 300 attending the reunion support the President’s visit, he said.

Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl are scheduled to lay a wreath Sunday at the German military cemetery in Bitburg where 2,000 German soldiers from World War II, including 49 members of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS, are buried.

The President, attending the seven-nation summit conference in Bonn, has vowed to go through with the visit despite vehement protests from U.S. veterans groups, Jewish organizations and the Congress.

The SS veterans and their families converged Friday on this small Bavarian town for a weekend reunion. Most of those already gathered at the reunion site, a local hotel, spent the day Friday reminiscing and greeting friends they had not seen in as many as 40 years.

‘A Closed Gathering’

Handwritten signs on the doors warned that the meeting was a “closed gathering.”

Burgmuedler said his group, the 3rd Panzer Division, was a front-line unit and should not be associated with the concentration camp atrocities committed by other units of the SS.

Another veteran, Rainer Hanke, 64, said he lost his right arm after four years of fighting on the Russian front.

“I only saw the front. I lost my arm when I was 22 years old. Then, when I came home, I was shunned as a criminal--I was a Nazi,” Hanke said.

The Waffen SS soldiers buried at Bitburg “were just as young and dumb as I, and they lost their lives,” he said. “Think of how terrible their relatives must feel about what is being said about them.”