Vets Administration backs down, agrees to remove gravestones

Markers adorned with swastikas, praise for Hitler

The federal government is taking steps to remove headstones that bear swastikas and praise for Adolf Hitler from veterans cemeteries.

The Department of Veterans Affairs run by President Donald Trump had resisted taking action — but reversed itself Monday evening after pressure from Democratic and Republican lawmakers who are in charge of the agency’s spending.

“VA’s initial decision to leave the gravestones in place was callous and irresponsible, but [Monday’s] decision is an honorable move in the right direction,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Broward/ Miami-Dade County Democrat, said in a statement.

She is chairwoman of the House Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee, and pressed VA Secretary Robert Wilkie over the issue at a hearing last week.

The VA said in a statement that it would “initiate the process” to replace the three headstones highlighted by Wasserman Schultz and the other appropriations leaders. The quiet announcement Monday from the VA reversing its previous stance came as news media attention was focused on protests in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. The agency said it couldn’t unilaterally replace the headstones, which mark the graves of German prisoners of war who died in the U.S. The VA said it would act in “consultation with stakeholders about how to replace these headstones with historically accurate markers that do not include the

Nazi swastika and German text.”

Two headstones at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio feature swastikas inside a German cross and the phrase, “He died far from his home for the Führer, people, and fatherland.” A third is at Fort Douglas Post Cemetery in Salt Lake City.

After the headstones are replaced, the VA proposed keeping them in a history collection.

The agency said it would install signs at all VA national cemeteries at which foreign enemy prisoners of war are interred to explain how they came to be buried in U.S. soil.

The bipartisan congressional push for removal came from Wasserman Schultz, U.S. Rep. John Carter of Texas, the subcommittee’s top Republican; U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, chairwoman of the full Appropriations Committee; and U.S. Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, the top Appropriations Committee Republican.

ANDREW HARNIK/AP Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, left, speaks with Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., following a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday.