Jewish Leader Calls Reagan’s Graves Visit Insensitive

President Reagan’s decision to go ahead with his visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg is insensitive, inexcusable and inadmissible, asserted Gerhart M. Riegner, co-chairman of the Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress.

Speaking at Temple Israel in Hollywood on Friday night, Riegner said Jews throughout the world felt a strong sense of “amazement and revolt about the insensitivity of the leader of this great country and the leader of the new Germany (Chancellor Helmut Kohl) when they decided to pay homage at the military cemetery of Bitburg, where there are buried not only ordinary German soldiers but large numbers of the SS, who more than anything else symbolized the evil of the Nazi state.”

West German authorities have said that 49 members of the Waffen SS combat forces are buried among the 1,887 graves of World War II soldiers.

Reigner added: “To maintain that decision in spite of the strong protest voiced all over the country, as well as in Europe and Israel, by Jews and non-Jews was an inexcusable and inadmissible gesture.”

Riegner said he did not see how it is possible, 40 years after the mass murder of Jews, that “statesmen of the democratic world do not understand the difference between reconciliation with the German people and reconciliation with Nazism, which the act at Bitburg implies?”

“It is no help at all if a commemoration at Belsen is at the last moment added as a balancing act. There are limits to political expediency and there is no compromise with moral principles.

“There is no compromise with absolute evil.”

Riegner said that in applying these “policies of political expediency” the leaders of the Western world were committing the same mistakes they made in the early 1930s. With anger, he said, Jews ask themselves “are we back in 1933 or 1942?”

In those days, from his post in Geneva as secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, he sent cables in 1942 to the U.S. State Department and to Britain’s Foreign Office, telling of Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He says, however, that no one believed him.

In an interview at his hotel Saturday, Riegner said it was not true, as many people still claim, that the full extent of the Nazi measures against the Jews became known only towards the end of the war. Information was available soon after the war began, and many people were told, he said.

“We certainly knew in 1941, in the fall,” he said. “We received a number of reports about mass killings and shootings from the Eastern Front and from Poland.”

Riegner said he wrote a letter to Nahum Goldmann, co-founder of the World Jewish Congress, in October, 1941, reporting on “terrible things that were going on” to Jews all over Europe and warning that if these events continued, he did not think many Jews would survive the war.

Riegner said he went to see the Papal Nuncio in Bern, Switzerland, to beg him to ask the church to help Jews in the Roman Catholic countries of Europe. “We gave him a memorandum he asked for in which we described the situation in a number of countries . . . and described the process of anti-Jewish measures, deportations, killings. The words ‘extermination’ and ‘annihilation’ occurred a number of times (in that memorandum),” he said.

At the end of July or early August, 1942, said Riegner, a leading German industrialist came to Switzerland to tell business friends there to warn Jews that the Nazis had formulated a plan for total extermination of 3.5 million to 4 million Jews in Europe, after transporting them to the east.

“It is easy today to know how true that was,” said Riegner. But then, “it took me several days to convince myself that this could be true. We made inquiries about this man and found he had previously predicted the Nazi invasion of Russia and German military and political moves.”

Although he came to believe the story was true, Riegner said, other Jews could not, or did not want to see what was coming.

“In 1943 I got a package (from the Federation of Polish Jews in America) with 30,000 addresses, Polish Jewish addresses, to whom I was supposed to send food packages. I almost went crazy when I got it . . . Those people were all dead already, or deported. And the people in New York had been told this. I couldn’t sleep for days.

“They (the Federation of Polish Jews in America) had been told that every day 6,000 people were taken out of Warsaw and taken to Treblinka extermination camp. They knew the ghetto was completely empty. All the ghettos were empty.”

Today, said Riegner, people ask how it was possible that many did not believe what was happening.

“A great part was that people couldn’t, didn’t want to believe it. It’s a cognitive problem. It doesn’t mean when you know something that you accept it.

“This (unwillingness to accept evil) is something very deep, very important. Ironically, I sometimes think it might be the most positive aspect to come out of the whole tragedy.

“People cannot believe in absolute evil. This gives me hope for the character of man.”