Happy Veteran’s Day — Remmembering the So-Called “Bitburg Controversy"

Edit: all of the usual hucksters, like the fraud Elie Wiesel, showed up to complain about Reagan visiting this cemetery to honor the dead who fought valiantly, defending their country against International Bolshevism.

[Politico] After attending a G-7 summit meeting in Bonn, in what was then West Germany, President Ronald Reagan on this day in 1985 made an eight-minute visit to the German war cemetery in Bitburg. Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, had suggested the side trip to the cemetery, where some 2,000 German soldiers lie buried, to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. 

Some U.S. Jewish leaders urged Reagan to forgo the visit, especially after it became known that the cemetery also housed the graves of 49 Nazi storm troopers, members of the Waffen-SS. The Nuremberg judicial tribunal, set up to try Nazi war criminals, found the military wing of the SS, all of whom were volunteers until 1943, to be active participants in the Holocaust. 

 In February 1985, the president’s deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, toured the Bitburg site, near the Germany [sic] border with Luxembourg. The 32 rows of graves were covered with snow at the time; Deaver failed to notice the headstones belonging to Waffen-SS casualties.

AMDG