Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie on Thursday seemed to soften his department’s earlier opposition to removing a handful of headstones bearing swastikas and other Nazi symbols in U.S. military cemeteries.
In his first public comments since the controversy erupted, Mr. Wilkie told a House oversight hearing Thursday that merely removing the offending headstones over the graves of captured German military prisoners from World War II isn’t the right answer.
“Erasing these headstones removes them from memory,” Mr. Wilkie said during a hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees veterans affairs. “The last thing any Holocaust scholar wants to do is erase that memory.”
But Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, took strong issue with the secretary, expressing anger that U.S. family members visiting their fallen loved ones are forced to walk past gravestones covered in Nazi imagery.
“These graves sit right alongside men and women who fought for our country and our ideals — ideals that run counter to everything the swastika and Nazi ideology represent,” said Ms. Wasserman Shultz, who chairs the veterans affairs subcommittee.
“But now they are under VA jurisdiction,” she said. “There’s no excuse for [them] to continue to maintain the headstones instead of replacing them.”
The German POWs were buried at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas, and the Fort Douglas Post Cemetery in Salt Lake City, Utah. At the time of the interments, both facilities were operated by the Army.
The headstones feature etchings of the Iron Cross and Nazi swastika along with an inscription in German: “He died for his home, for the Fuhrer, people and Fatherland.”
The VA has claimed their hands were tied by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, intended to preserve historic and archeological sites in the U.S.
The VA’s interpretation of that legislation is a “gross misreading” of the law, Ms. Wasserman Schultz said during Thursday’s hearing. For a gravesite to be covered, it would have to be a “historical figure of outstanding importance,” she said.
“German soldiers who took up arms against the United States do not meet this criteria,” she said.
Mr. Wilkie also defended the VA’s handling so far of the coronavirus pandemic and the potentially devastating impact it could have on the aging cohort of veterans served by the department.
He also revealed that VA health sites have all but stopped use of an unproven malaria drug on veterans with COVID-19 that President Trump has publicly touted.
While initial doses of hydroxychloroquine may have given patients “hope,” government-run VA hospitals, the largest single network in the country, have “ratcheted it down” — to just three prescriptions in the last week — as studies pointed to possible dangers and other possible treatments were brought online, The Associated Press reported.
“We are all learning as we go in this crisis,” Mr. Wilkie told lawmakers. “Our mission is to preserve and protect life.”
According to the VA’s website, 13,657 veterans have been infected with the coronavirus, and 1,200 have died.
The opposition the VA’s hands-off policy regarding Nazi symbols was bipartisan. Texas Rep. John Carter, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican, said removing the offending headstones was “the right thing to do.”
“You should replace them with regular headstones that just say they were German prisoners of war — that’s it,” said Mr. Carter. “Take the Nazi symbols off them.”
Mr. Wilkie said he would review any proposals — such as moving the offending gravestones to another section of the cemetery where their history could be better explained.
“I don’t think we’re that far off. I do think that putting those [headstones] in context in the cemeteries is the way forward,” Mr. Wilkie said.
But Ms. Wasserman Schultz pushed for more.
“A review is not a commitment. This is going to be done one way or the other,” she said.
χ This article was based in part on wire service reports.
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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