FORGIVENESS.(Nazi cemeteries, German leaders, Joseph Ratzinger )

In the spring of 2004, Joseph Ratzinger went to France as the personal representative of Pope John Paul II, who had asked him to deliver papal blessings at the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. Ratzinger, who was then seventy-seven and a cardinal, was to participate in several services, including an ecumenical ceremony in English with Cardinal Francis George, of Chicago, at Omaha Beach on Saturday, June 5th. The next day, Ratzinger joined more than a dozen government leaders on the beach at Arromanches. The dignitaries included the French President, Jacques Chirac; the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder; the Russian President, Vladimir Putin; Queen Elizabeth II; and George W. Bush.

After the Saturday-morning ceremony at the American cemetery at Omaha Beach, attended by thousands of United States veterans and covered by the major American television networks, Ratzinger had lunch with Pierre Pican, the Bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux, and then drove twenty minutes along the two-lane N 13 to the isolated cemetery of La Cambe in order to pay his respects to the twenty-one thousand German war dead buried there. There was little publicity for the event, and few reporters were present.

Ratzinger's discretion was understandable. Among those buried at La Cambe were members of the Waffen S.S. panzer division Das Reich, an elite military arm of the Nazis. The dead included Michael Wittmann, a legendary tank commander, and Adolf Diekmann, a major--Sturmbannfuhrer --who oversaw the massacre of villagers in nearby Oradour-sur-Glane. Of the six hundred and forty-two victims, two hundred and thirty-one were children; only six villagers survived.

In the weeks leading up to the commemoration, conservative opposition leaders in Germany noted that Schroder had excluded La Cambe from his Normandy itinerary, and the cemetery became the focus of an acrimonious public debate. "Herr Schroder is constantly preaching patriotism," Peter Ramsauer, a conservative member of the Bundestag, said. "But if he passes a cemetery for German soldiers and does not lay a wreath, to my mind he is an anti-patriot." The centrist Free Democrat Gunther Nolting also urged Schroder to reconsider. From the fringe right came charges of Vaterlandverrat--betrayal of the fatherland.

For Schroder, Helmut Kohl's efforts to honor the German war dead, two decades earlier, still resonated. As part of Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to West Germany, Kohl arranged a wreath-laying ceremony at a German military cemetery near the American base in Bitburg. When American journalists reported that the cemetery contained the graves of S.S. soldiers, protesters demanded that the ceremony be cancelled. Two weeks before Reagan's trip to Germany, Elie Wiesel, while accepting the Congressional Medal of Honor, spoke out against the proposed visit. "That place, Mr. President, is not your place," he said. "Your place is with the victims of the S.S." For Kohl, the situation was politically impossible. If he relented, he would be accused of bowing to foreign pressure. If he went ahead, he risked international outrage. Horst Teltschik, Kohl's foreign-policy adviser, told me that when Kohl called Reagan to discuss the scheduled visit Reagan said, "Helmut, we are going to do it." Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, suggests that Reagan would have welcomed an excuse to cancel the visit, which took place as planned despite continued criticism. Schroder, as the first German Chancellor to attend a Normandy commemoration, was determined to avoid a repeat of the Bitburg debacle. At Bitburg, there were dozens of S.S. graves. At La Cambe, there were hundreds.

Unlike the American cemetery at Omaha Beach, with its 9,387 pristine white marble headstones, La Cambe is a sombre and distinctly Teutonic enclosure. Clusters of waist-high markers, rough-hewn from granite in the shape of Iron Crosses, stand amid the individual tombstones. Many graves bear the anonymous inscription "Ein deutscher Soldat" ("A German soldier"). A central tumulus contains the remains of an additional two hundred and ninety-six unidentified soldiers, and is dominated by a large stone marker, also in the shape of an Iron Cross. Relatively few people visit La Cambe; most are returning German war veterans, or German families mourning their fallen kin. On the afternoon of Ratzinger's visit, the cemetery was virtually empty. A film crew wandered the grounds in search of people to interview, as did a correspondent for the Berliner Zeitung and a reporter for the local newspaper Paris-Normandie.

Shortly after two o'clock, Ratzinger entered the cemetery, accompanied by Pican and Fortunato Baldelli, the papal nuncio to France, as well as a few other Church officials. The procession moved solemnly along the central axis of the cemetery, and assembled at the base of the tumulus.