Did Reagan blunder in Bitburg visit?

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The press and TV made it seem as if Reagan's visit to Bitburg was merely the result of an incredible series of blunders ranging from poor staffwork to a number of inept remarks by Reagan. Actually the visit to the German cemetery met the needs of the American ruling class.

Reagan's propensity to make wild statements when not carefully guided by teleprompters made a delicate situation into a media disaster.

First, he said that a visit to a concentration camp site would only awaken the memories... and passions" of the past, suggesting that Nazi genocide had best be forgotten.

Announcing he planned to visit to a German cemetery that contained the graves of SS soldiers, he said that those buried there were as much victims of Nazism as those who died in the concentration camps. He put the SS stormtroopers in the same category as those they murdered:

Reagan's comments not only revealed his moral and intellectual obtuseness, they also inadvertantly revealed what was at stake in the German visit. The Kohl government has held out against massive antiwar protests in West Germany and permitted the United States army to install Pershing II missiles, which can strike Moscow in six minutes after launching. Kohl is also a staunch supporter of Reagan's 'Star Wars' project.

It was important that Reagan demonstrate the closest support and collaboration with his staunchest ally in Europe.

Lay an old quarrel to rest But why did Kohl insist on the visit even if it meant embarrassment for Reagan? The answer: to organize a chorus of patriotic nationalism seeking to drown out the antiwar movement.

Such a resurgence of German patriotism would make growing militarism an accepted aspect of German life. Kohl's plan for Reagan's presence at the graves of German soldiers would say symbolically that World War II was an old quarrel with no bearing on their relationship today.

Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, an adviser to Kohl, was quoted in The New York Times as saying that West Germany is "the most pessimistic nation you can find."

What she implied was that German youth, who are finding it hard to get jobs, are not taken in by all the talk about the wonders of German democracy "Reagan had to demonstrate his support for his closest ally in Europe."

and are resistant to patriotic appeals. These calls patriotism are all too similar to the Nazi appeals the past.

A recent study by the Allensbach Institute of generational attitudes in the United States and 10 Western European countries showed that young West Germans have less in common with their parents in terms of their moral, religious, and political attitudes than youth in any of the other countries compared.

Manfred Rommel, the son of Hitler's Field Marshall Rommel and the Christian Democratic mayor of Stuttgart, said that young Germans have learned wrong lessons from the history of Nazism.

"They say, 'Since Hitler demanded discipline, I will decide by my conscience, " he asserted. "But it was not just discipline Hitler demanded, but discipline for Hitler."

What the Christian Democrats evidently want is unquestioning obedience not to Hitler, who is dead anyway, but to the Kohl government.

Under the guise of homage to the war dead, the Kohl government sought to obscure its own ties to the Nazi past. It cannot admit that it is the antiwar movement that is the real opponent of the Nazi totalitarianism. Kohl accuses the antiwar youth of being pawns of another form of totalitarianism.

The message of the ceremony at Bitburg was that it was only a few evil men who composed the Nazi government—Reagan with his customary crudity spoke of the government as "one man's totalitarian dictatorship."

Now that they are gone, he implied, 4 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1985 people can stand united against a freedom from the East.

Rewriting history

The Bitburg ceremony speeches rewrote history. The big-business interests now ruling the new "democratic" Germany extolled by Reagan include the Thyssen, Krupp, and I.G. Farben companies, which were the same ones that financed the Nazi movement. In the wartime plants of I.G. Farben slave laborers were worked to death.

Friedrich Karl Flick, who, as was revealed in a great scandal a year ago, gave out more than $8 million to people in the Christian Democratic, Free Democratic, and Social-Democratic parties, is the son of Friedrich Flick, who was convicted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal of having "used slave labor, spoliation and of being an accessory to the crimes of the SS."

Friedrich Flick, given a seven-year term, got out after three years, returned to his position in industry, and went on to become the wealthiest man in West Germany.

In order for the Kohl government to present itself as the heir of an anti-Nazi resistance, a spokesman for Kohl announced that Col. Berthold von Stauffenberg, whose father Count von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic staff officer, sought to assassinate Hitler in 1944, would be present at Bitburg.

The plan was dropped, however, after Col. von Stauffenberg told news people that he was "dismayed" by the announcement, wouldn't comment on how he felt about the visit, and added, "In the military one doesn't really go of one's own decision."

On the other hand, Major General Remer, the 73year-old former Waffen SS officer, loyal to Hitler to the end, was not so reticent about his feelings concerning the Bitburg visit. "It was high time, stated the neo-Nazi leader. "After all we are all sitting in one boat, in NATO."

The original opposition to the Nazis was not mentioned at the Bitburg ceremony. This was the mighty working-class movement-Social-Democrats, Communists, and trade unionists-which had to be crushed before the awful totalitarian machine could roll over the German people.

The rank-and-file of these parties and their leaders themselves were by the many tens of thousands the first victims of the Nazis. It was for them that Dachau was built.

So too today the members of the left and the antiwar movements are the genuine anti-fascists. Far from covering up the past, they hold seminars and exhibitions about the Nazi period, drawing lessons from it and pointing out how the press today encourages racist feeling against immigrant workers. The Green Party in the Bundestag presented a resolution urging that the Bitburg visit be eliminated.

On the "wrong" side U.S. policy also has its continuities with the past. In an interview last October, Reagan attacked the Americans who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, commenting, "I would say that the individuals that went over there were in the opinions most the wrong side."

In the opinion of most Americans, according to Reagan-that is, of most right-thinking Americans like him-they should have been fighting not against the Franco fascists but with them, giving them the same support as did Mussolini and Hitler!

But Reagan only stated bluntly what was the policy of the Roosevelt administration. It clamped an embargo on Loyalist Spain that helped weaken its struggle. Just so did Mondale suggest during the election campaign an embargo against Nicaragua, and Democratic members of Congress today, while expressing tactical differences on the pace and method of aid to the contras, are going along with Reagan's attack on revolutionary Nicaragua.

In his profound Bitburg insult, Reagan carried on a long American tradition of ignoring the plight of the Holocaust victims until it was too late to save them. Such was the policy of the Roosevelt administration during the Nazi murders [see article on opposite page].

The boat of forgiveness Reagan also has ample precedent for his forgiveness of the Nazi murderers. John Loftus, who had a high position in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, states in his well-documented "The Belarus Secret" (Knopf, 1982) that thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, including top criminals of the worst sort, were recruited by American intelligence beginning in 1945 when World War II was coming to an end.

Many of them were parachuted into the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, where they tried unsuccessfully to act as spies, saboteurs, and guerrilla troops. Others, supplied with fictitious documents, were sent to the United States and South America.

To cite but one example from among the many examples documented by Loftus, Stanislaw Stanievich, who as mayor of Borisov in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia directed the murder of 7000 Jews in a massacre in which babies were buried alive in mass graves, worked for the CIA-operated Radio Liberty and died a U.S. citizen.

Anti-Semitism is again on the rise in the "new" Germany. And the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, among others, have exposed the close relationship of the Reagan administration to unabashed American anti-Semites and racists, some of whom serve in the administration, others who serve as policy advisers... as long as their anti-communist credentials are impeccable.

Why, then, should Reagan have raised "petty" objections about honoring 49 SS soldiers? After all, as the neo-Nazi Remer said, "We are all sitting in one boat."

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Rock-and-roll producer/impresario Bill Graham placed a full page advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle calling on people to rally in Union Square against President Reagan's impending visit to Bitburg.

A large crowd turned out on one day's notice. Reagan's trip set off a wave of revulsion and fear among Jews. Those who considered the U.S. president the greatest ally of the Jews were shocked that he would visit a cemetery where Nazi stormtroopers are buried.

But was this slap in the face of world Jewry-especially Holocaust survivors-really a departure from past U.S. policy? The evidence says "No"!

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust historian and gifted novelist, helped rewrite the U.S. historical record when he spoke April 19 Today a growing number of U.S. churches are providing sanctuary to Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. This sanctuary struggle is rooted in the anti-intervention movement like the movement to aid the Jews was rooted in the labor movement of the 1930s.

Today's sanctuary movement is indicative of the moral determination of ordinary American people not to be complicit with the U.S. government's policies in Central America, which have already lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans. The sanctuary movement is scoring great success in saving lives and exposing the U.S. government's role.

The fight against anti-Semitism In "The Transitional Program," a document approved by the founding conference of the Fourth International