U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Pete Hoekstra on Thursday visited a Nazi cemetery and called the experience a “terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace.” Hoekstra is a former GOP Congressman who served as the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
The cemetery is the burial place of dead Nazis killed in World War II, and other German soldiers from both WWI and WWII. Thursday was a Jewish day of mourning, Tisha B’Av, known as “the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.”
In World War II the Nazis murdered an estimated 6 million Jews.
The nonprofit news site Michigan Advance notes that “Neo-Nazis have been known to visit to honor Nazis buried” at at the Ysselsteyn German war cemetery. It is the largest World War II German cemetery.
Why a United States Ambassador is mourning the deaths of Nazi soldiers is incomprehensible to many, who expressed outrage on social media.
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