Amid much controversy, on 8 May 1985, Kohl and Reagan visited the Bitburg cemetery and placed memorial wreathes to honor all of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS men buried there. The American historian Fritz Stern wrote that Kohl and Reagan were engaging in "symbolic politics" with the Bitburg ceremony, to suggest the memory of the Nazi past should to a certain extent be exorcised with the idea to honor those who died fighting in the Waffen-SS as victims of Hitler, but instead the immense controversy caused by the Bitburg ceremony caused shown that the Nazi past could not be "normalized" as they had wished. On the same day as the Bitburg ceremony, the West German president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered a speech in Bonn which was an "implicit rebuke" to the Bitburg ceremony where he stated the Jews exterminated in the Holocaust were much more victims of Hitler than those Germans who died fighting for Hitler. In the same speech, Weizsäcker also stated the memory of the Nazi past could not be "normalized" and the memory of the Nazi era would always be a source of shame for Germans. The contrasting reactions to the Bitburg controversy and to Weizsäcker's speech brought to the fore the question of whether Germans should still feel shame at the Nazi past forty years later or not. On one side, there were those who insist that West Germany was a "normal" country that should have a "normal" history that would inspire national pride in being German, and on the other there were those who insisted the memory of the Nazi era could not be "normalized" and be a source of national pride. The debate was not entirely along left-right lines as Weizsäcker was a Second World War veteran and a conservative.