Forty years ago, I became politically active. I didn’t join any party, nor did I run for parliament—which, as a German Jew, wouldn’t have been realistic at the time anyway. But I began to make the fight against antisemitism my “life’s work.” Through demonstrations, petitions, and, above all, countless conversations with politicians from all over the world.
Ever since my student days, it had become clear to me that antisemitism in Germany had not disappeared with Hitler. Unpleasant incidents at university had forced me, who considered myself a secular German, to examine my Jewish identity more deeply than I had previously thought possible. I became president of the European Union of Jewish Students, but pursued this as an unpaid hobby alongside my internship in oral surgery.
Until that event in May 1985 that would change my life forever: the joint visit of the German Chancellor and the American President to a military cemetery in Bitburg, in the Eifel region.
The story has been told often enough: Helmut Kohl wanted to use Ronald Reagan’s visit to Germany, exactly 40 years after the end of World War II, as a gesture of “reconciliation over the graves.” However, when choosing the cemetery, he overlooked the fact that members of the Waffen-SS were also buried there. Instead of quickly correcting the mistake, Kohl stubbornly stuck to the location. His negligence in choosing the location put him in a situation he probably couldn’t have foreseen.
Kohl, whose brother Walter had fallen in the war, had made “Never again war” one of the guiding principles of his policy. I’m sure he wanted to send a sincere message of reconciliation with the president of the former enemy, the United States, and the Federal Republic’s most important ally. Of course, this was supposed to be about a bright future, through which the bad past would be left behind. Kohl hadn’t planned a debate about this very past.
With the discovery of the SS graves, however, this could no longer be avoided. Suddenly, the issue was no longer reconciliation, but rather whether to draw a line under this very past. Suddenly, everything revolved around the SS, which was supposed to be part of the great reconciliation. By including them, reconciliation was achieved not with the former enemies, but with the Nazi regime. For even if the epitome of Nazi terror could be reclassified, this meant nothing less than the end of historical responsibility for the Nazi era.
As I said, I don’t believe that was Kohl’s original intention. But that’s exactly what the subsequent public debate revolved around. And that’s exactly what triggered such outrage in me, the son of two Holocaust survivors, that it practically drove me to action.
I used the short time before Reagan’s visit to Germany to organize, in coordination with the Jewish communities, a large demonstration in front of the Bitburg cemetery. The demonstration took place, even though it couldn’t prevent Reagan’s visit there. From the outset, I hadn’t really believed in the success of my endeavor. But I felt I couldn’t remain inactive. But we weren’t alone in our protest. We found like-minded people, especially across the Atlantic. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told Reagan to his face that his place was not on the side of the SS, but on the side of their victims. Many Jewish organizations were horrified and publicly shared their horror.
Finally, on May 1, 1985, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution urging the President to cancel the cemetery visit. Under enormous pressure from the Chancellor, who explained to his American counterpart that the continued existence of his federal government depended on the planned wreath-laying ceremony, Reagan continued with the Bitburg visit. However, the appointment was shortened to ten minutes and supplemented by a visit to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.
Dachau, another concentration camp memorial, had actually been on the itinerary. However, this was canceled at the request of the federal government. Now the hastily added detour to Bergen-Belsen seemed like mere cosmetic measures to  defuse Reagan’s faux pas in Bitburg. Even if the public criticism didn’t result in the cancellation of the event, it at least sparked a public debate. However, this debate unfolded significantly differently than I had expected; indeed, even in retrospect 40 years later, it represents the real scandal that overshadows Kohl’s misconduct.
He, whom I consider one of the most important statesmen of the last century despite some disagreements, was known for his stubbornness. I found his behavior wrong, but it didn’t surprise me. What was unexpected and shocking, however, was the response Kohl received. It began with Reagan, who justified his visit by saying that in Germany today, there are few people left who can remember the Second World War and hardly anyone who actively participated in it.
This was an absurd statement even for Reagan, who was lax in his handling of the truth. He himself had already been in his thirties at the time of the war. His vice president, George H.W. Bush, had actively participated as a naval pilot. Even though Reagan quickly corrected his mistake, his statement fit perfectly with the dual message that not only Kohl was now spreading: The Third Reich was now a very long time ago and it was time to focus on the future.
The visit to the military cemetery was intended to cover—and hide—this past with a cloak of reconciliation. Because, and this was also the point, this past was simultaneously to be cleansed of its unpleasant aspects, its dark stains. Neither Kohl nor any other serious public figure denied the Holocaust or any other Nazi crime.
Only they resorted to the method already popular in the 1950s of absolving the German population of any guilt. Kohl used the alleged youth of those buried in Bitburg to declare these men innocent victims who had been drafted into military service and subsequently fallen.
Although the Waffen-SS men buried in Bitburg were included in the commemoration of Reagan’s visit only by a stupid coincidence, the Chancellor extended the cloak of forgiveness to them as well. He did so with the doubly false claim that conscripts had been drafted into the Waffen-SS on a large scale, often against their will. He also falsely claimed that the Waffen-SS had little more in common with the general SS than the infamous double rune.
Had these soldiers survived the war, Kohl told the CDU federal executive board, they would in most cases have likely led decent lives as members of West German society. The latter may be true. Kohl was equally right in his statement about the many opportunities for becoming entangled in injustice between 1933 and 1945, and the few and difficult ways to escape it.
However, instead of deriving from this a reflection on the character and functioning of the Nazi dictatorship, he summarily absolved those “entangled in the wrong” of responsibility with the argument that subsequent generations could not presume to judge them.
This was a somewhat strange attitude at a time when Nazi perpetrators regularly ended up in German criminal courts. Moreover, it’s quite a long way from non-condemnation to honoring them. But in Kohl’s mind, this was the logical next step. Because future generations don’t have the right to judge the actions of the fallen, the latter shouldn’t be denied honor.
The only people he allowed to take a different stance were the survivors of the Holocaust. If they were unable to forgive or forget, “it would not be our place to judge such an attitude, let alone condemn it.” However, Kohl himself immediately qualified this statement: “It’s wonderful […] when someone who had to go through all that still speaks the liberating word of forgiveness. But we have neither a moral nor a legal right to such an attitude.”
The Holocaust survivors who were unwilling to accept what Kohl defined as “forgiveness” for the actions of an organization deemed criminal at Nuremberg were apparently, in his view, suffering from an understandable but regrettable traumatic disorder, which made them incapable of a morally correct attitude. This morally correct attitude, however, was unconditional forgiveness.Â
It was clear to many: Kohl had lost his way. He now desperately tried to save the unfortunate situation without reversing his original decision. In doing so, he only made things worse.
But he wasn’t alone. In the Bundestag debate, he received support not only from his own parliamentary group and his coalition partner, the FDP. The SPD also agreed with his basic thesis. Anke Fuchs accused him of taking an overly undifferentiated stance, only to immediately agree with Kurt Schumacher and his exculpatory statements about the Waffen-SS, which Kohl had already cited.
Only the Greens withdrew from this remembrance-policy comfort zone. However, only their own 24 members of parliament voted in favor of their motion to cancel the cemetery visit. All other 398 members of parliament rejected it, thus giving Kohl the support he longed for.
But that wasn’t enough: Critics of Kohl’s course quickly found themselves in the crossfire. Union parliamentary group leader Alfred Dregger wrote an outraged letter to the US senators, accusing them of insulting his brother, who had fallen on the Eastern Front, and of betraying the ideals of decency and human dignity.
Unlike Kohl, Dregger did not dwell on questions of guilt, but instead declared himself and the Germans of his generation collective victims of the Third Reich. They had been “subjected to a Nazi dictatorship for twelve years.” He defended their behavior as morally right by describing his own military service as a defense of Silesia from the Red Army. His Nazi Party membership, which he kept secret throughout his life, did not bother Dregger’s victim story any more than the question of why the Red Army had entered Silesia in the first place.
While one could at least still grant West German politicians the need to consider the feelings of their voters, including former war veterans, this motivation was absent from public opinion. Consequently, one might have expected more critical statements. But the opposite was the case.
Some media outlets followed Dregger’s lead and directed their media anger at those in the United States who had protested Reagan’s plans. The culprits were quickly identified: American Jews.
The magazine “Quick” took the worst of it. It saw a well-organized Jewish lobby at work, dominating Wall Street and the world of money. Thanks to a high degree of organization and a far-reaching network, “Quick” claimed that six million American Jews were able to influence 209 million non-Jewish Americans and even put massive pressure on the American president.
Last but not least, the paper suggested that all major television stations were in the hands of a few Jews. Finally, “Quick” even cast doubt on the number of victims of the Shoah. The article stated that “four million, Jewish sources say six million” people were murdered. In short: apart from desecration of the host and hooked noses, the magazine, which at the time had a circulation of over one million copies, hardly left out an antisemitic stereotype.Â
The venerable “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ) didn’t slip so far. But it, too, through its editor Fritz Ulrich Fack, complained about alleged attempts to thwart German-American reconciliation. Here, too, the culprits were American Jews, even if the FAZ was too refined to say so so clearly.
Instead, it was claimed that a “powerful journalistic machine” was “persecuting people down to the seventh generation” and was “grateful for every opportunity to resurrect the distorted image of the ugly German.” The article continued: “Its operators don’t mind sorting even the dead and turning the president into a puppet. Here, the lust for power is intertwined with the business interests of an entertainment industry that always welcomes the ‘Nazi theme.'”
The fact that the opposition to Reagan’s Bitburg visit did not come solely from Jewish organizations played no role for many media outlets, nor did the consideration that there were good reasons why Jews should be alarmed by the impending honoring of an organization that was closely linked to the Holocaust.
As shocking and disgusting as these articles were, they struck a nerve in the population. Surveys showed a significant rise in antisemitism in the aftermath of Bitburg. I, too, remember comments in private conversations that I no longer believed possible.
For example, Kohl’s security advisor Horst Teltschick warned his American counterparts that younger Germans in particular were shocked by the power of American Jews and the pressure they exerted on the US president. He added that Germans now better understood the problems Germany had faced before World War II.
This outrageous statement was nothing less than an indirect justification of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. And even though, with my intimate knowledge of him from many conversations, I am certain that Teltschick was not expressing his own opinion, but rather the opinion “on the street,” such an argument from a high-ranking government official remains elusive to this day.
Within a very short time, a mistake in the program of the presidential visit had turned into a call for a line under the past and even the justification of a criminal organization. In the end, the Jews were also supposed to be to blame for all of this.
Bitburg was a low point in the history of Germany’s coming to terms with its past. In retrospect, everything seems difficult to understand and, above all, infinitely far away. A wreath-laying ceremony at a cemetery with SS graves, a defense of the Wehrmacht as a supposed bulwark against the Red Army, a newspaper article lamenting the excessive influence of the Jews, a parliament that stamped kosher on all of this: such events would certainly not happen today.
The combination of advances in historical knowledge, public debate, and, yes, even scandals like this one has ensured that such crude trivializations of the Third Reich are no longer conceivable today. This is a reason for joy and strengthens my conviction that my efforts back then may have had some impact after all.
Nevertheless, doubts remain. What has changed most is demographics. While Reagan’s statements about the distance from World War II were absurd 40 years ago, they are true today: There are only a few survivors of World War II left. Unlike in 1985, a German chancellor today no longer has to consider the feelings of Wehrmacht veterans.
As absurd as Dregger’s claim was, it deeply resonated with the feelings of many former soldiers who were unwilling to admit that they had risked their lives for a criminal regime. Internationally, the Federal Republic of Germany is no longer primarily viewed through the prism of Nazi crimes, but enjoys a high reputation worldwide as an economically strong country with a leading role in Europe.
The war is now eight decades ago—so long that even a reconciliation over the graves would seem merely ritualistic today. But the memory of the Nazi era and the Holocaust is also ritualized. Every year on January 27th and November 9th, we hear the invocation of “Never again.” That’s good and right. But can we really claim to have progressed further today than we were in 1985?
How exactly should this incantation be translated into action? If Kohl was right about one point, it was how easy it is to become a perpetrator in an unjust regime—or, as he put it, “to become entangled in injustice.”
Recent historical research suggests that most Germans opposed the mass murder of millions of Jews. However, this did not deter them from participating in its execution. Likewise, the National Socialist leadership could not rely on widespread enthusiasm for the war, but rather on the “fulfillment of duty” of millions of German soldiers, even to the point of unconditional surrender.
Even more important than warnings about a resurgence of anti-Semitism and xenophobia would be a precise understanding of the mechanisms of dictators’ actions and the realization that the best time to combat them is long before they come to power. There is reason to doubt that this realization is truly firmly anchored in everyone’s minds.
Wehrmacht exhibitions, local studies, and extensive investigations into the role of government ministries have clearly demonstrated the extent to which all organizations were involved in Nazi crimes. Yet most Germans born later assume their grandparents were uninvolved.
They obviously don’t understand the tragedy Kohl described. At the same time, we are seeing the rise of parties that trample on the democratic consensus. We have seen in Hungary, for example, how quickly such parties can destroy democracy and the rule of law once they are in power. In Poland, such attempts were at least already quite advanced, and no one can predict whether the USA will still be a functioning democracy in four years.
At the same time, radical right-wing parties themselves are abandoning the consensus on memory politics that had already developed before Bitburg by, like the AfD’s lead candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, who no longer describes the Germans during the Third Reich as mere victims, but as “heroes.”
Four decades after the end of World War II, almost all democratic parties shied away from condemning the Third Reich in all its facets. Forty years later, nearly one in four Germans votes for a right-wing extremist party.
Just 40 years after the collapse of National Socialism, most Germans wanted to put an end to the past. Today, 80 years later, an openly racist party is the strongest force in 46 constituencies.
In 1985, Alfred Dregger defended the Wehrmacht. Today, the strongest faction in the Thuringian state parliament is led by a politician who, according to a court ruling, can be called a “fascist.” Forty years ago, I realized how virulent anti-Semitic prejudices still were in German society. Four decades later, Jews even feel physically threatened again.
Bitburg showed me back then that we still had a lot of work ahead of us. Today, as a German of Jewish faith, I feel that our successes since then may have been in vain. Because there’s something in the air that reminds me of the stories from before 1933: Forty years after Bitburg, the political center appears more enlightened and more aware of German crimes. But this center is much smaller and more fragile than it was back then.
