Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [119]
Bernd then took us to the cemetery. Of course he had no idea he was participating in a reconnaissance mission, aiding and abetting a Jew and a journalist who planned on raising a ruckus the next day. We felt bad that after our arrests he’d probably be hauled in for questioning as to why he was “the driver” for these anarchists.
At first glance, what one notices about the Bitburg cemetery is how small it is. If you had visions of Arlington or Normandy in your head, they were quickly dashed by this half-acre plot of flat grave markers with six cement crosses and a chapel that more resembled a crematorium.
This was The Day Before, and the local Germans were busy laying flowers on all the graves and tidying up for the president’s visit. The press was there, too, photographing the SS graves from every angle imaginable and interviewing Bitburgers about their connection to the SS.
One elderly German woman was going around and taking flowers off non-Nazi graves and placing them in abundance on the SS graves. She was mumbling something nasty in German as she went about her one-woman “up yours” crusade as the cameras rolled. Her presence was making the Bitburg city officials a bit nervous. “Why are you filming her?” the deputy mayor of Bitburg asked the ABC-TV crew.
“Just try to stay out of our way if you can” was the response of an ABC field producer as the crew shoved the deputy mayor aside.
Humiliated by this treatment, he turned to me and said, “You Americans. You don’t listen. You print what you want to fit your ideas of what is and what isn’t.” He then pulled out two covers of Newsweek magazine. One was the U.S. edition, the other the international. Both had the same cover of an SS grave, but the U.S. edition had two West German flags stuck into the Nazi grave.
“Newsweek doctored this photo,” he said, “so as to imply that we Germans today honor the Nazis. Have you read The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum? This is what you Americans want—to strip us of our dignity and our honor.”
We awoke Sunday morning for the big day and began to implement our plan. Underneath his sweater, Gary wrapped around his torso a forty-square-foot banner our friends Jack and Laurie had painted for us back in Ann Arbor. It read:
We Came from Michigan, USA, to Remind You:
They Murdered My Family
With both real and fake press passes around our necks and camera bags in hand, we set off on our two-mile walk to the cemetery.
What we discovered was that overnight Bitburg had turned into a police state, with 17,000 German army soldiers, security officials, and cops from every walk of life having surrounded the town and set up a series of checkpoints, making it almost impossible to get to the cemetery. One thing the Germans were making certain of: no one would get within a mile of the Bitburg cemetery without having proved that they were Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley. And there on the road leading up to the cemetery, about a half mile away, the German police nabbed us.
“This is as far as you go,” the officers barked at us in German. Gary, who is fluent in German, told him that we were assured that we would be allowed in the cemetery.
“You’ll have to discuss that with the police chief,” he said and then motioned us to start walking back into town.
We returned to town and went to the city hall, where we found the police chief besieged by other reporters who apparently had met the same fate as ours. Sizing up the situation, it appeared that the reporters from the Knight-Ridder group were having the most luck with the chief, so we moseyed over to them and hung close as if we were part of their team. Finally, the chief got on the phone and told the command post on the cemetery road to let this group