80 Senators Urge Reagan to Reconsider Bitburg Visit : Sen. Dole Co-Sponsors Resolution

With 80 senators sponsoring the measure, the Senate today urged President Reagan to reconsider his planned visit to the Bitburg cemetery in West Germany where 49 members of Adolf Hitler’s elite SS are buried.

The mayor of Bitburg, meanwhile, said the town’s citizens are “scandalized and dismayed” by the furor and might cancel the visit themselves.

The Senate, by voice vote, adopted a resolution hailing the reconciliation between the United States and West Germany 40 years after the end of World II and calling on Reagan to reassess his plan to lay a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery. Instead, the resolution said, Reagan should visit a symbol of German democracy.

The co-sponsors included Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, who told the chamber “this is not an effort to jump on the President” but “an expression of the Senate that we should pay homage to the memories of the millions of civilians and the American and Allied soldiers who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.”

Before the vote, senator after senator called on West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for action “to take our President off the hook.”

Cranston’s Statement

“I don’t think the President of the United States should go to a German cemetery to honor German soldiers who died killing American soldiers . . . in the service of the greatest tyrant of our times, Adolf Hitler,” said Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.).

Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) said Reagan does not enhance the spirit of reconciliation by “paying respect to the Nazi SS who are buried at Bitburg” and who belonged to an elite unit that “did so many horrors at the concentration camps.”

“I believe that the position of the Germans in insisting the President carry out his plans to visit Bitburg does not redound to their credit,” Metzenbaum said.

The Senate resolution came a day after 257 members of the House wrote to Kohl urging that the visit be canceled.

Kohl is writing to the congressmen and sending them a copy of the speech he made Thursday in Parliament defending the decision to keep Bitburg on the itinerary, Bonn government spokesman Peter Boenisch said. He added that the visit is still on.

‘Abuse and Slander’

But in Bitburg, Mayor Theo Hallet said, “Our people find unbearable the gushing forth of abuse and slander on our city, and especially on the soldiers lying in the cemetery. If it continues like this, then it would be better if we would cancel (the visit) ourselves.”

Reagan and Kohl could go to Bitburg without Hallet’s approval. But the mayor’s remarks indicated that the town’s initial joy over the visit has evaporated. Hallet was euphoric at first and has written twice in the last two weeks to U.S. Ambassador Arthur Burns urging that the visit not be canceled.

Reagan has planned to lay a wreath at the cemetery May 5 during a state visit to West Germany, but what he intended as a gesture of reconciliation 40 years after Germany’s defeat in World War II has become a political nightmare.

American veterans’ groups oppose it and Jews condemn it because 49 graves are of combat soldiers from the Nazi SS, which ran Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps. Even Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister and Reagan’s staunchest European ally, expressed “considerable sympathy” Thursday with those who want him to cancel.

In response to the growing criticism, Reagan added to his itinerary a visit to the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

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