Letter Urged Reversal of Bitburg Stop : Reagan Aide Wrote Bonn About Visit; No Changes Planned

A White House adviser wrote to the West German government urging a reversal of President Reagan’s planned visit to a military cemetery, the chief spokesman for the Bonn government said today, while his counterpart in Washington said Reagan has not changed his plans.

Peter Boenisch said in Bonn that a Reagan adviser had sent a “private” letter to a West German official asking that Bonn suggest an alternative to Reagan’s controversial plans to visit a cemetery in Bitburg on May 5 that contains the bodies of 47 Nazi SS soldiers.

But Boenisch said Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Reagan made their decision to stick to the Bitburg plan in a telephone conversation Friday.

“They have not changed their minds. The visit is firm,” Boenisch said.

Reagan last week responded to the outcry over the Bitburg visit by adding a stop at Bergen-Belsen, a former Nazi concentration camp, where he will honor the victims of the Holocaust.

“There is no change in the Bitburg plans. There is no change in the President’s plan to go to Bitburg,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes said today.

Boenisch said the White House letter was sent to Bonn before Kohl and Reagan talked last Friday.

Letter Writer Not Disclosed

He refused to say who had written the letter. He said it was not written to Kohl, but refused to say to whom it had been addressed.

The chancellor telephoned Reagan after hearing about the letter because he was concerned that Reagan’s advisers would try to talk the President out of the Bitburg visit, Boenisch said.

“Since the (Friday) decision, there have been neither official nor unofficial attempts by the White House to change the schedule” for Reagan’s May 1-6 state visit, he said.

The New York Times reported today that either National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane or one of his aides had sent a private message to Kohl over the weekend, asking him to seek an alternative to the Bitburg cemetery visit.

In the telephone call Friday, Kohl asked the President to stick to the plan to visit Bitburg, saying a cancellation would be misunderstood by his “German friends,” Boenisch said.

In New York today, the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, writer Elie Wiesel, said he believed that either Reagan or his West German hosts will cancel the visit. Another member of the council said its 65 members were considering resigning en masse if the visit goes through.