Whistling Past the Graveyard

At the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site and at the U.S. air base near Bitburg on Sunday, President Reagan spoke eloquently of the agonies of the past and the imperatives of remembrance. At the German military cemetery at Bitburg, where 49 members of Hitler’s SS lie among the dead, the President wisely chose to say nothing. He went to that burial ground at the insistence of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, fulfilling a promise made in haste and likely long after to be rued. The chancellor had his own political reasons for bringing Reagan to Bitburg, and perhaps he has benefited from that journey of homage. Reagan surely has not.

The brief stroll through the cemetery was promoted as a symbol of reconciliation between old enemies. But was such a gesture, stained as it proved to be by the presence of SS graves, really necessary? For nearly 40 years, from the Berlin airlift through the continuing and costly presence of a quarter-million U.S. troops stationed on West German soil, the United States has demonstrated its friendship, its fidelity to the alliance, its concern for the security and well-being of its erstwhile foe. Reconciliation has long since taken place, visibly and concretely. Kohl’s determination to embellish it by the visit to Bitburg was a blunder that did nothing to enhance the longstanding reality.

There is indeed a new Germany now, as there has been for some time--democratic in its politics, responsible in the conduct of its affairs, respected throughout the world for its accomplishments. But there is an old Germany as well--the Germany of the extermination camps and the SS, the Germany of military aggression and the long nightmare of brutal occupation. That Germany is dead, but the evil that it did, as the President said repeatedly on Sunday, must never be forgotten and never, anywhere, be allowed to recur. The inexpungable record and judgment of history stand. It is right that the new Germany should be honored. The grievous mistake came in allowing the sharp distinction between this Germany and its predecessor to be blurred.