The Bitburg controversy involved a ceremonial visit by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to a German military cemetery in Bitburg, a town in extreme western Germany near the border with Luxembourg, in May 1985, designed to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe 40 years earlier. The visit aroused considerable criticism, both in the United States and around the world, due to the many burial plots at the site dedicated to members of the Waffen-SS – a military arm of the Third Reich's SS (Schutzstaffel). Waffen-SS, alongside with the entire SS, was judged to be a criminal organisation by the Nuremberg trials. The controversy was compounded by the fact that Reagan did not visit the sites of former Nazi concentration camps.