Reagan Rejects Plea to Cancel Cemetery Visit

President Reagan Friday rejected the plea of a survivor of two Nazi death camps that he cancel a visit to a German cemetery containing the graves of 47 storm troopers and instead honor “the victims of the SS.”

Elie Wiesel, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, made the appeal as a man who had “seen the SS at work” to put aside politics and focus on the moral issue of good or evil.

Minutes after Wiesel, regarded the foremost literary chronicler of the Holocaust era when 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accepted a Congressional Gold Medal, the White House announced that the President would visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp May 5 and then fly to the Bitburg German army cemetery for a 20-minute wreath-laying ceremony.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said there were no plans to drop the cemetery visit. However, he relied on one of the President’s favorite phrases and said “you should never say never” when asked if the ceremony might yet be scrapped.

‘I Implore You’

As a tight-lipped Reagan kept his eyes fixed on the noted author who was a prisoner at both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Wiesel said, “May I implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another site. That place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Wiesel, 56, said all issues relating to Reagan’s May 5 and 6 state visit to Germany “transcend politics and diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil, and we must never confuse them.”

Before the ceremony, Reagan and Wiesel met privately for 25 minutes where Reagan explained his rationale for visiting the German cemetery in Bitburg.

Reagan spoke by phone with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl Friday morning, but Speakes would not say whether the Bitburg controversy was discussed.

There were reports that some in the Administration had been seeking a way out of the situation. NBC reported and Speakes declined to confirm or deny that aides acting without presidential authority contacted the Germans seeking some way of canceling the Bitburg visit.

Rarely has there been such a public confrontation between a President and a White House guest. Wiesel, who made the same appeal at a Holocaust ceremony in the Capitol Thursday, considered declining to accept the medal, but then chose to do so, presumably so he could address Reagan directly. His first act was to give the medal to his 12-year-old son.

Wiesel said he recognized that Reagan was “a friend of the Jewish people” and made clear that he took no joy in being critical of the President.

Wiesel departed from his prepared text to tell Reagan, “I wouldn’t be the person I am and you wouldn’t respect me for what I am if I were not to tell you also of the sadness that is in my heart for what happened during the last week.

“And I am sure that you too are sad for the same reasons,” he added. “So may I speak to you, Mr. President, with respect and admiration of the events that happened?”

He said each time he had met with Reagan before, “I came away enriched, for I know of your commitment to humanity. And, therefore, I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke, that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery.”

No Direct Comment

Reagan did not comment directly on his planned trip to Bitburg during the ceremony.

Reagan signed a proclamation declaring Jewish Heritage Week and pledging to work to remove “the cancer of anti-Semitism in America” and elsewhere, particularly the Soviet Union.

“To say never again is not enough,” Reagan said. “If the Soviet Union truly wants peace, truly wants friendship, then let them release Anatoly Scharansky and free Soviet Jewry.”

Reagan spoke of “a spirit of reconciliation between the peoples of the allied nations and the people of Germany and even between the soldiers who fought each other on the battlefields of Europe. That spirit must grow and be strengthened.”

“You seek reconciliation and so do I and so do we,” Wiesel replied. “And I too wish to attain reconciliation with the German people . . . and I believe, Mr. President, we must work to bring peace and understanding to a tormented world, which as you know is still awaiting redemption.”

As he begged Reagan to reconsider, Wiesel said, “I have seen the SS at work. I have seen the victims. They were my friends. They were my parents. There was a degree of suffering and loneliness in the concentration camp that defies imagination, cut off from the world, with no refuge anywhere. Sons watched helplessly their fathers being beaten to death. Mothers watched their children die of hunger. And then there was Mengele and the selections. Terror, fear, isolation, torture, gas chambers, flames, flames rising to the heavens.”