Reagan's German Cemetery Visit Controversy (1985)
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's May 5th. This day in 1985, President Reagan visits a German military cemetery in Bitburg, where a number of SS Soldiers were buried.
Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss why the visit to the cemetery had been a controversial decision for months, why Reagan still went ahead with the visit -- and how the attempt to clean up the mess afterwards didn't go any better.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:10.6 | This day, May 6, 1985, President Ronald Reagan is in Germany and makes an eight-minute stop to visit a German War Cemetery in Bitburg at the suggestion of West German |
| 0:22.6 | Chancellor Helmut Cole. This is to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. But this |
| 0:28.6 | visit and this site were quickly controversial because it turns out that Bitburg Cemetery was the |
| 0:33.6 | burial site for German soldiers, including members of the SS. So here it is a moment to mark |
| 0:40.0 | the anniversary at the end of the war, to remember the horrors of the war. But the Jewish |
| 0:44.3 | victims of the Holocaust were largely absent from this solemn moment. It turned into a huge |
| 0:50.1 | controversy, and as in many stories, the attempt to clean up the controversy just added more fuel |
| 0:55.8 | to the fire. I want to give a shout out to listener Steve, who recommended we do this. Actually, |
| 1:00.1 | Steve's emails was from a couple years ago. So there it is, folks, evidence that we will |
| 1:03.4 | eventually get to stuff once we put it on the list. But here. Get those emails in now for |
| 1:08.7 | 2028. |
| 1:09.9 | I know. |
| 1:11.7 | Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. |
| 1:17.1 | Hello, Jody. Hey there. |
| 1:18.8 | This is a really fascinating story, fascinating moment. I guess my question is Reagan is visiting Germany. |
| 1:25.1 | Why would Helmut Cole, West German Chancellor, suggest to him, |
| 1:29.2 | hey, the place we should go pay a visit to is a place where there are no Jewish victims, |
| 1:33.4 | and instead it is German soldiers? |
| 1:36.5 | There are a couple of reasons. First of all, West Germany was one of the United States |
| 1:41.6 | Cold War allies. And so there's this idea that now that they're on the same side, maybe they can put aside some of the tensions of the past and recognize that the soldiers and all of their armies fought honorably. We've actually talked about this in the way that the Confederate soldiers were sort of folded back into the war |
| 2:00.8 | memory in the United States. So I think that that's part of it, right? We're all going to come |
... |
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