A trip by Adenauer to Washington in 1953 marked a high point of these efforts. On April 8, he visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The German flag – the black, red and gold tricolor of the Federal Republic, not the black, sword-bearing eagle of Prussia or the swastika of the Thousand Year Reich – was raised above Arlington National Cemetery. As the chancellor strode toward the tomb, a twenty-one-gun salute sounded in a scene with which Adenauer would end the 1945–53 volume of his memoirs: An American band played the German national anthem. I saw how tears were running down the face of one
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