The headstones of two German prisoners of war who died in a Texas POW camp during World War II have been removed from their graves because they featured Nazi swastikas, CBS News reports.

The graves are at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, interspersed among the graves of American servicemembers and other honored dead.  New headstones were put over the graves of Alfred P. Kafka and Georg Forst Wednesday morning.

“Clearly, it took a long time for this to happen, and it’s obviously the right thing to have been done,” said Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.  Since it learned of the symbols last may, the foundation had lobbied the Department of Veterans Affairs, which maintains military cemeteries, to remove the markers.

At first, Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilke refused to remove the headstones, claiming it was the duty of the VA to preserve “historic resources.”  However, members of Congress including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Congress members Will Hurd, Kay Granger and Joaquin Castro urged him to remove the Nazi symbols.

“I’m glad that the headstones have been replaced,” Castro said. “It’s jarring to think that symbols of the Third Reich and the Nazi regime would stand in an American military cemetery.”

Another headstone with a swastika is located a military cemetary in Utah; it is unclear if that was removed as well.