Chris McGreal in Jerusalem Monday October 28, 2002 The Guardian

The German embassy in Tel Aviv has adopted a novel approach to atoning for Nazi crimes by inviting Israeli army officers to attend a ceremony in honour of the Third Reich's fallen soldiers, including SS units.

The German military attaché compounded the blunder as he tried to defend the invitations by saying that some SS soldiers were victims not criminals, and that the dead should not be divided into good and bad.

While such views might be the subject of debate elsewhere, they have been taken as insensitive, at best, coming from a German soldier posted to a country of Holocaust survivors and relatives of the murdered.

The ceremony is to be held next month at a cemetery in Nazareth for Germany's first world war dead. The military attaché, Colonel Ernst Elbers, dispatched a number of invitations to Israeli reserve army officers who are involved in research into the 1914-18 war.

They initially assumed the ceremony was limited to remembering those who died in that conflict and were horrified to discover that the memorial will be to "honour the memory of the fallen and missing servicemen in both world wars".

One of those invited, Brigadier-General Yigal Shefi, who teaches military history at Tel Aviv University, called Col Elbers' office to protest. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Brig-Gen Shefi protested that he was essentially being asked to honour the memory of Field Marshal Rommel, who intended to capture Palestine and even to honour the memory of Hitler.

Col Elbers dug himself deeper into trouble with the Israeli press as he tried to explain that two of his uncles fell fighting for Hitler.

He said that not everyone who served in the SS was responsible for war crimes because "among the slain soldiers in the battles were 17-year-old boys who were conscripted against their will to the Waffen SS toward the end of the war."

"There is no point in dividing the dead into 'good' dead and 'bad' dead," Col Elbers added.

Many Israelis will be shocked to discover that there have been ceremonies in their country for years to remember German war dead albeit under a cloak of secrecy until Col Elbers decided to widen the invitation list.

Usually, those invited are limited to the representatives in Israel of countries which fought in both wars, including Britain and Commonwealth nations, the US, Russia and the heirs of the defunct Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Only a handful of Germans killed in the second world war are buried in Israel, including Nazi spies executed by the British.

Israeli forces do take part in the annual ceremony in memory of fallen British soldiers who, in the 1939-45 war, included Jews from Palestine who fought with the British Brigade.

-- Anonymous, October 28, 2002

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-- Anonymous, October 28, 2002