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. The intense controversy caused by the Bitburg memorial service with its suggestion that the Nazi era was a "normal" period led those who were in favor of "normalization" to redouble their efforts. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper published an opinion piece in early 1986 saying that the Jews needed to be "tactful" in dealing with Germans and should not be bringing up the Holocaust as that would insult German sensitivities. The minister-president of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauss, complained that the Germans had spent too long "on their knees" and needed to learn how to "walk tall again", arguing that 40 years of guilt had been quite enough. As part of his "walk tall" speech, Strauss argued that West Germany needed to "become a normal nation again", saying "German history cannot be presented as an endless chain of mistakes and crimes", and that Germans should be proud to be German. Strauss's reference to the Germans "kneeling" in his "walk tall" speech was to the Kniefall von Warschau when in 1970 the