Reagan Urged to Honor Anti-Nazi German Dead

Elie Wiesel, the concentration camp survivor who urged President Reagan last Friday to reconsider plans to visit a German military cemetery where 47 Nazi SS troops are buried, suggested Sunday that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl release the President from his commitment.

As a “perfect” alternative, Wiesel said, Reagan and Kohl should go to the site of the grim Ploetzensee prison in the Charlottenburg sector of West Berlin, where leaders of the anti-Nazi underground were put to death.

If Reagan goes to Ploetzensee, Wiesel said, he will be paying tribute to the “real heroes of Germany,” such as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, executed for his role in the abortive 1944 bombing plot against Adolf Hitler, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor executed in 1945 for his role in the anti-Nazi resistance.

Wiesel commented during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley,” which centered on the controversy raised by Reagan’s plan to visit the cemetery at Bitburg, which contains the graves of about 2,800 German soldiers killed in World Wars I and II. Wiesel said Kohl should issue a statement saying: “Mr. President, I realize now that this journey could be difficult for you and therefore I release you from your commitment, and please, let us go elsewhere.”

In the same vein, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said during an appearance on NBC’s televised “Meet the Press” that “Chancellor Kohl might be helpful” in finding an “alternative course” for the President. Dole called the choice of cemeteries unfortunate and agreed with a questioner that the Bitburg visit should be canceled.

Wiesel, chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, rejected a suggestion that Reagan would “appear to be weak” if he cancels the plan to visit Bitburg.

Wiesel said he could understand it if Reagan, as an act of reconciliation, were to visit a German military cemetery where there were no SS graves. However, he argued that a visit to Bitburg would amount to an implicit “signal of the rehabilitation of the SS,” even though that elite Nazi force has been branded “an association of criminals, guilty of war crimes.”