80 Senators Oppose Visit to Bitburg

With 80 senators sponsoring the measure, the Senate today asked President Reagan to consider canceling his planned visit to a German military cemetery where 49 members of Adolf Hitler’s elite SS are buried.

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 War II and calling on Reagan to reassess his plans to lay a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery.

Instead, the resolution said, Reagan should visit a symbol of German democracy.

The resolution also said Reagan’s trip to West Germany was a fitting gesture, and that the U.S. government should honor “the memories of the millions of innocent civilians and hundreds of thousands of American and Allied soldiers who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.”

Reagan has brushed aside any suggestion that he cancel the trip to Bitburg, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany has praised him for not yielding to pressure from critics of the trip. But Bitburg Mayor Theo Hallet said Friday that the people of Bitburg “find unbearable the gushing forth of abuse and slander on our city and especially on the soldiers lying in the cemetery” and may themselves cancel the visit, scheduled for May 5.

The resolution’s co-sponsors included Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the Senate majority leader, who told the chamber “the record is clear that this is not an effort to jump on the President.”

“It’s 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.

“We want reconciliation. The German people have been our friends.”

In the moments before the vote, senator after senator called on Kohl for action “to take our President off the hook.”

“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.)

“That there are graves of SS troops in that cemetery makes an unsavory act intolerable,” Cranston said.

Cranston said the Senate’s action should “send a very strong and clear message to the government of West Germany that this situation is doing what could cause very great damage to the relations between us and that it would be wise of the West German government to cooperate” to cancel the trip.

“We believe that the spirit of reconciliation that exists between our country and the Federal Republic of Germany is in the best interest of democracy and world peace,” said Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio.)

But he said Reagan does not enhance that spirit of reconciliation by “paying respect to the Nazi SS who are buried at Bitburg” and who belonged to an elite Nazi 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.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) intoned the names of the concentration camps where Jews and other minorities were killed by SS guards and said, “President Reagan made a mistake when he scheduled this visit and he will be making an even bigger mistake by refusing to cancel it.

“The trip to the Bitburg cemetery contradicts the important purpose of his visit,” Kennedy said. “It opens old wounds at the expense of reconciliation.”