
Bitburg controversy
The Bitburg controversy preceded and followed a ceremonial visit by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to a German military cemetery in Bitburg, a town in extreme western Germany, in May 1985, designed to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe 40 years earlier. The visit aroused considerable criticism in the United States and around the world, when it became known that of the nearly 2,000 German soldiers buried there, 49 were soldiers of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of Nazi Germany's SS. The entire SS was judged to be a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg trials. The fact that Reagan had not been scheduled to visit former Nazi concentration-camp sites compounded the controversy, and a trip to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was later added to his itinerary.