Veterans Affairs says it intends to ‘preserve’ swastikas in US cemeteries

The Department of Veterans Affairs is taking heat from Congress after rejecting a civil rights group’s request to remove headstones engraved with Nazi iconography from the national cemetery at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas — as originally reported by Salon — opting instead to “continue to preserve” the markers.

In a statement, House Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said the VA’s response — which came the same day that the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic incidents had hit an all-time high in 2019 — was “callous, irresponsible and unacceptable,” and demanded the department change course.

The headstones top the graves of two German POWs who died in 1943 as captives of the U.S. Army. Along with the soldiers’ names and dates of their births and deaths, the milk-white marble is engraved with a swastika in the center of an Iron Cross — the German army’s award for valor — and the phrase, “He died far from his home for the Führer, people and fatherland.” Continue reading.