Toespraak minister Timmermans bij Arlington: Finding Leo Lichten - A Tribute to our Liberators

Toespraak | 30-04-2014

Ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for being here with me today, at Arlington National Cemetery.

A special word of welcome to Leo Slater, son of Paul Slater, boyhood friend and comrade in arms of the man we are honoring here today, and who is named after him.

We are gathered here to honor the memory of Private First Class Leo Lichten, who was killed in action almost 70 years ago, on 20 November 1944. He was one of the 169 American soldiers who died during Operation Clipper, a joint US-British assault on the Geilenkirchen salient of the Siegfried Line. Today he rests in the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in Margraten in Limburg, the most southerly Dutch province.

Margraten is one of the 24 American burial grounds on foreign soil, administered, operated and maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. Well over 8,000 American servicemen are buried there, 8,000 of the 93,000 American soldiers who found their final resting place in Europe during the Second World War. They sacrificed their lives so that people in Europe could live in freedom. Anyone who wants to feel the strength of the transatlantic partnership – to feel what lies at its heart – should visit Margraten or other military cemeteries that dot the landscape of Western Europe.

All the graves at Margraten have been adopted by private citizens, most of them Dutch, as an expression of our everlasting gratitude and our determination to keep these memories alive. My family and I have been given the opportunity to take care of the grave of Leo Lichten. We feel privileged to do so.

We could have been offered any soldier’s grave for adoption. But fate decreed that it was his. The grave of a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. A boy whose parents were recent immigrants from the very continent where their son found his final resting place. They came from a region that is now partly Ukrainian, partly Polish.

It was a smart decision by Leo’s father, Max or Mayer Lichten, and Leo’s mother, Mollie Greenfeld or Greinfeld, to book tickets for the steamers that would take them across the ocean. The Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names shows that at least 49 people by the name of Lichten or Likhten perished in the Holocaust, many from the same region that Leo’s father came from.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” – these words are engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

And they came. From Galicia, like Leo’s parents. From Scandinavia, Germany, the Baltic States, from my own country, from Ireland, Spain – from all the corners of Europe. They joined the massive talent pool that is the United States of America. They became part of a society in which migration was considered normal. Unlike Europe, where sedentary life was the norm, where you lived in the same place that your ancestors had lived for generations. The manifest destiny of the USA was their destiny. It came at a price, though. Not everybody would find happiness. Not everybody would migrate voluntarily. Native Americans and African Americans would suffer gravely.

Europeans came. And their children and grandchildren went back there, first to Britain, then to North Africa, to Italy, Normandy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and finally, at long last, to Germany and Austria.

In February 1945, shortly after the liberation of the south of Limburg, an inhabitant of Heerlen, my hometown, wrote a letter reflecting on his contacts with American troops: “We get to know all the peoples of Europe … we have been visited by Irish, Scots, English, Indians [unclear why he considers them to be European…], Jews, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Greek, Austrians, Poles, Norwegians, Finns, Russians, French and mixtures thereof!”

Like this anonymous letter writer, any European who walks round Margraten nowadays will be struck by the many different cultures represented by the names on the graves.

I’ve taken a random selection from the 8,301 names inscribed on the headstones and the 1,722 names on the Wall of Missing. Among them – and there are over 10,000 – you will find names from:

Ireland: three O’Connors and three Fitzgeralds

Scotland: two sons of the MacLellan clan

• Italy: a man with the peculiar and colourful name of Libaerato di Iorio;
• Greece: Peter J. Faklis;
• Poland: Zigmund J. Grzelok;
• Norway: George W. Forbregd;
• Finland: Edward E. Hyvonen;
• Hungary: Joseph Nagy;
• Lithuania: Benjamin Gudaitis;
• and from the Low Countries: 38 men whose names start with the preposition “van”: Sylvan Van Aalten, Stuart D. Van Deventer, Earle A. Van Popering, to name but a few, recalling the Dutch and Belgian towns and villages their forebears came from.

And many, many more names of men whose ancestors came from Germany and Austria, the very countries they were about to enter and free from Nazi rule. To mention just a few: George A. Gerstenmaier, Norman E. Hornbacher, Gerhardt W. Schoengrund and Clarence L. Weissgerber. As I said, this is a random selection of names from the headstones at Margraten, and from the websites that honor these heroes.

They died for the freedom of Europe. And thus they died for the freedom of America and of the world as a whole. It gives one pause to think that the descendants of those who chose not to live in Europe or who were forced to leave it, now rest in European soil. Thus, the short lives of Leo Lichten and his comrades confirm the shared destiny of the Old and the New World.

World War II brought the two continents together in many respects: politically, economically and culturally. With hindsight, this may seem self-evident. In those days, however, liberation gave way to a bewildering set of mixed emotions. My countryman Ian Buruma – Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, NY – recently published an eloquent study about the way in which liberation was experienced in different parts of the world, by different populations: Year Zero - a History of 1945. I very much recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about the way in which people in Europe and in Asia reacted.

Of course liberation brought relief, it made people feel grateful and happy. It inspired exultation, as Professor Buruma puts it.

At the same time, it also caused confusion. Desperation, horror at the news of the fate of Jewish compatriots. Anger, a wish to take revenge on the Germans or Japanese.

And even feelings of jealousy, of envy towards the liberators. I just quoted from a letter written by somebody from Heerlen. Elsewhere in Limburg, in Maastricht an observer wrote about the American troops, rhetorically asking an American soldier: ‘Have you ever thought about it ... how the Americans compared with that worn-out European man with his emaciated face, his threadbare clothes, his sad, earnest gaze and his wallet, robbed of cash? … There you were in your smart uniform. With your athletic, well-nourished body. Your youth, your strength, your charming smile ... Your booze, your donuts, your freedom of movement, and especially your freedom of opinion.’

Yes, ‘especially your freedom of opinion’!

You could call that jealousy petty, but it went deeper. It reflected a latent sense of discomfort that many Europeans – many continental Europeans at least – felt when confronted with Americans. To be complete, the liberation of Europe had to overcome those sentiments. 1945 was not only about overcoming tyranny and injustice, fear and terror. The liberation had to become a mental revolution as well. Gradually, people in my country and elsewhere in Europe came to realize that they had been locked in. Locked in time, locked in a mindset. We had to send out our huddled masses for them to find freedom. And they and their descendants brought it back to us, the freedom that they found in the United States. Not just political or economic freedom, but also cultural freedom.

Democratic freedom was scarce in Europe, immediately prior to World War II. The UK and Ireland, the three Benelux countries and the countries of Scandinavia, France, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia were the only European multiparty democracies in the true sense of the word. After the war, it was the United States that stimulated the deepening and widening of democracy in Western Europe. European integration was actively supported by the US as an effective instrument to stabilize and strengthen Western European democracies. Marshall Aid and NATO laid the foundations for the successful democratization of Germany and Italy, later followed by Greece, Portugal and Spain. And both NATO and the EU created the bedrock for the democracies that emerged in the former Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe.

Important as they are, the enjoyment of these fundamental freedoms would have been hollow and sterile had they not been accompanied by a spiritual and cultural liberation. A liberation that would also result in many other freedoms – the freedom to have fun, the freedom to be relaxed, artistic freedom and musical freedom, to name but a few.

Many concepts come to mind, many movements that were created and inspired by the US: jazz music, beat poetry, method acting. American modernism percolated back into Europe, liberating whole generations of European composers and musicians, poets and writers, intellectuals, architects, painters and filmmakers.

And quite often, they were recent European immigrants to the US who would successfully transform the artistic climate. They had germinated in Europe, matured and blossomed in the US, and now they re-pollinated the European scene. The Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning springs to mind, German Bauhaus architects like Gropius and Mies, filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock and all these others in the movie business, composers like Korngold and Stravinsky.

It is this that lies at the heart of the unbreakable bond between the US and Europe. It is more than a shared commitment to the values of democracy, upholding the rule of law and respect for human rights. It is more than a wish to maintain economic ties, to trade and invest across the ocean. It is the desire to inspire and to receive inspiration at all levels of human enterprise and endeavor.

Yet this transatlantic solidarity is not a given.

Yes, there is a military alliance that is the bedrock of the international security architecture. NATO is the pillar of international stability.

Yes, on both sides of the ocean governments are working to create the largest free trade area in the world, the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership – TTIP - which is also a geopolitical project, not just an economic one.

TTIP will further strengthen political and economic relations between the EU and the US. Enhancing trade and investment cooperation between the two largest economies in the world will not only help in securing our economic interests. It will also provide an extra safeguard for our shared values. I can only agree with President Obama, when he called the negotiations ‘groundbreaking’ at the G8 last June.

And yet.

There are still people who doubt the intrinsic need for EU-US cooperation. There are still people who question the need to further deepen trade and investment ties. And there are still people who applaud when third countries act in ways that harm the international system we built up after World War II.

They are not necessarily the same people. Yet I do sense that there are overlapping agendas. In the 19th century there was a Holy Alliance between Austria, Germany and Russia, acting as a bastion against calls for democracy, revolution and secularism. Today there is an unholy alliance of anti-EU and anti-American sentiments – an alliance of not so strange bedfellows: the anti-American and the EU opponent.

Both anti-Americans and EU opponents seem to fall for Russian propaganda claiming that President Putin was forced to act as he did in Ukraine because of a deliberate policy of European/American encirclement.

The Anti-Americans feel that the US and her allies can no longer claim the moral high ground. The US and its friends supposedly lost the right to stand up for Ukraine (or Georgia for that matter), having been embroiled in wars of their own, e.g. in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in actions resulting in the independence of Kosovo, the legitimacy of which is questioned. Pointing to the Snowden/NSA affair this group exonerates President Putin for his psy-op methods, for the presumably unscripted leaking of telephone calls made by European and American officials regarding Ukraine.

The EU opponents see in President Putin a shining example of someone who stands up for the national interest. Who fights for the preservation of his national culture. Who refuses to deliver his country up to Muslims, gays, Jews, immigrants or whoever else offends the EU opponent in question. And above all, who stands in the way of any eastward enlargement of the detested EU (or NATO).

It is crucial for the current and future security and stability of both the US and Europe that we continue to think straight and properly analyze this crisis, the largest political and security crisis since a divided Europe was reunified twenty-five years ago. Whatever wrongs the US and the West might have committed in the past twenty-five years – be it in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Iraq or elsewhere – whatever one may think of the process of European integration, there is no imaginable excuse for the Russian actions in Ukraine.

President Putin seems to say ‘I’m not getting my way, so I will intervene’. We have seen that before. His doctrine echoes the words of Greek historian Thucydides: ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Make no mistake: the EU and the US stand together in making clear that the Putin doctrine can never provide stability on the European continent or - for that matter - anywhere else in the world.

After all, if this doctrine is accepted – either explicitly or implicitly – it is only a matter of time before another European country faces Russian demands that, if not met, will unleash destabilizing actions. The very possibility of such actions is in itself a source of instability. It stands in the way of the harmonious political and economic development of our continent.

Our Alliance – as embodied by NATO – is strong. Very much stronger than the support that Russia garnered from its motley coalition, as witnessed in the recent UN vote condemning the Russian actions in Ukraine. Just ten countries out of almost 200 supported the Russian position. I am confident that we will be able to convince Russia that it is acting against its own strategic interests by flaunting the fundamental norms of international society.

At the same time it is good to realize that the strength or weakness of the EU is determined not in Moscow or Washington, but in our own countries. In this context, I am somewhat mystified by those who oppose the EU. It is a peculiar form of contrariness, of self-delusion – a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Whoever thinks that weakening the EU will result in the emergence of individual states that are better equipped to ensure stability and security on the continent would do well to consider what an approach of this kind yielded prior to 1945 or prior to 1914. Not much good.

Let me conclude, ladies and gentlemen.

The story of our liberators will never cease to fill me with awe. And the personal stories of these men and women deserve to be retold. I am proud that I could unearth more details about the story of Leo Lichten. I have written a little booklet about him and about the voyage that took him to Europe. I hope you will enjoy it. The stories of many others remain untold. I very much support the efforts of the Foundation behind the initiative to adopt individual graves, to collect more information about the soldiers buried and honored at Margraten. I very much support their desire to collect photos of these men, to give these heroes a face. And I hope my booklet will contribute to that effort. Incredibly, there are still soldiers buried there of whom there is no picture, no recollection whatsoever.

So please – if there is anyone among you who is familiar with the stories of the boys of Margraten: share these stories. Share them with the people of Margraten Cemetery, share them with your friends and family.

It is something we owe to those who died. It is something we owe to those who live.

Thank you, Leo Lichten. God bless you.

And thank you all for being here. God bless you all. God bless the United States of Americ

a and God bless the Netherlands.