THE PRESIDENT IN EUROPE : Accepts Bitburg Invitation : No Reconciliation Needed, Son of Foe of Hitler Says

The son of a German count who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944 said that he will go to President Reagan’s wreath-laying ceremony at a German war cemetery today despite reservations that have nothing to do with the few Waffen SS graves at the cemetery.

West German army Col. Berthold von Stauffenberg, son of Claus von Stauffenberg, said that he dislikes all public ceremonies and sees no reason why a gesture of reconciliation is required to maintain U.S.-West German relations.

“I didn’t realize relations were so bad,” he said by telephone from his home at Oppenweiler, in southwest Germany. “I was always treated very well when I went to the United States.”

He said that he was contacted last week and asked to attend the ceremony and decided to go because his reservations are personal rather than a matter of conscience.

“When the chancellor asks me to go, then as an officer of the army, I will go,” he said.

However, relatives of some other resistance figures said that they would not respond to a government invitation to go to Bitburg, about 60 miles southwest of here. They cited the 49 graves of SS combat soldiers, which are among 1,887 German World War II dead in the cemetary. A separate SS wing administered Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps.

Marianne von Schwerin, widow of a German officer executed as a result of his participation in the Hitler assassination plot, said flatly, “I have no intention of honoring the SS.”

Alfred von Hofacker, whose father was hanged by the Nazis, told Reuters news agency, “If I went to Bitburg, I would feel like I was being used as a fig leaf to hide someone’s embarrassment.”