Reagan Considers Visit to Concentration Camp : Aides Sent to W. Germany to Find Site in Effort to Silence Furor Over Plan to Honor War Dead

Pressured by angry Jewish groups, President Reagan on Monday sent two top aides back to West Germany to find a former Nazi concentration camp for him to visit when he travels to Europe next month.

However, the President signaled that he still intends to visit a German military cemetery to lay a wreath at the graves of German soldiers killed in World Wars I and II. He did so after receiving a letter from West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl asking him not to cancel the ceremony.

Trying to calm an uproar over the announcement last week that he would honor German war dead as a symbol of postwar reconciliation but would not visit a concentration camp or the graves of American soldiers in Europe, Reagan sent adviser Michael K. Deaver back to West Germany “to look at other opportunities,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes announced.

Deaver, who was primarily responsible for planning the President’s trip during a visit to Western Europe in February, was accompanied by White House chief advance man William Henkel.

Although Reagan earlier rejected a West German proposal that he visit the infamous Dachau concentration camp, contending that it would rekindle German “guilt feelings” rather than promote reconciliation, Speakes said the President now is willing to commemorate the Holocaust at such a site. Aides have also said privately that a synagogue might be added to the itinerary.

An Administration official who asked not to be identified said that Reagan personally approved his entire schedule before it was publicly announced last Thursday. Speakes acknowledged Monday that outrage expressed by Jewish groups and the American Legion has changed Reagan’s mind.

In New York, 29 members of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council--a group appointed primarily by Reagan--demanded Monday that the President cancel his visit to the Bitburg cemetery, which is near a staging area used for German tanks just before the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

Council chairman Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps, said that the addition of a concentration camp or synagogue to Reagan’s itinerary will not satisfy the council.

“These are separate things. They are not linked,” Wiesel said. “The visit to this particular cemetery is to us unacceptable.”

Wiesel said members of Adolf Hitler’s SS units are buried at Bitburg. “These are not soldiers--they are criminals,” Wiesel said.

“It goes beyond the Jews. Those SS men probably were involved in the massacre of American soldiers after the Battle of the Bulge. . . . They are butchers of American soldiers.”

In Bonn, the West German government rejected demands that Reagan call off his plans to participate with Kohl in the wreath-laying ceremony at Bitburg. Spokesman Peter Boenisch called public criticism of Reagan “practically an insult” and added that “the President has no need to be reminded of the Americans who fell in the war or of the Jewish victims of Nazism.”

Boenisch refused to answer reporters’ questions about the SS (elite force) troops buried at Bitburg. This, he said, “is a question of secondary importance.” He said the purpose of the visit was to demonstrate the reconciliation of wartime foes, and not to honor any individuals or military units.

‘Victims of Fascism’

The Kohl government attempted to quell the international controversy by suggesting publicly--as it apparently did privately three months ago--that Reagan visit a memorial to Nazi victims, perhaps at Dachau. “We would welcome a (concentration) camp visit and honoring of the victims of fascism,” Boenisch said.

He added: “No one in the federal government or in the democratic camp is afraid to face the crimes that were committed. . . . But 40 years after the war, it must also be possible on such a visit to carry out a gesture of reconciliation and a demonstration of peace.”

However, in Israel, the Maariv newspaper editorialized: “With whom is Ronald Reagan going to carry out his symbolic act of conciliation? With the jackboots that trampled across Europe . . . and almost succeeded in annihilating the freedom and putting an end to democracy of the whole world?”

In Sacramento, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said during a Holocaust commemoration in the state Assembly chamber, “Let not history record that a President of the United States went to Germany and placed a greater symbolic emphasis on those who fought on the side of the Swastika than those who lost their lives because of it.”

Speakes said Reagan was concerned “that people question his sincerity to victims of the Holocaust.” But he said the President and Kohl are “of the same mind . . . this trip should be in the spirit of reconciliation.”

Reagan is scheduled to leave Washington on April 30, attend the annual seven-nation economic summit conference in Bonn on May 2-3, visit the cemetery on May 5, travel to Madrid on May 6, observe the 40th anniversary of V-E Day with a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on May 8, and fly home from Lisbon on May 10.

Times reporters Bob Drogin in New York and Tyler Marshall in Bonn contributed to this story.