Bush Hails E. Berlin’s Action as ‘Liberation’ : U.S. Reaction: President urges East Germans to stay home, join reforms. Lawmakers foresee end of the wall.

President Bush on Thursday hailed the opening of East Germany’s borders as a “liberation,” but he urged East Germans to resist the pull of the West and remain at home to reform their country.

The announcement from East Berlin caught Bush Administration officials by surprise, sending shock waves through the White House and the government’s foreign policy Establishment and leading some U.S. officials to worry that the changes that have rocked East Germany are coming too fast.

“What I’d like to think is that the political change in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) would catch up very fast with this liberation,” the President said. “. . . at some point I think a lot of Germans who have felt penned in and unable to move are going to say, ‘Look, we can move but wouldn’t it be better to participate in the reforms that are taking place in my--in our country?’ So I think it’s too early to predict that . . . everybody is going to take off.”

In Congress, the East German decision was portrayed as a step that will lead to the destruction of the Berlin Wall, which has divided the city since 1961. Congressional leaders called for the Bush Administration to work swiftly with West Germany and others in Western Europe to support further changes, including free elections.

At the Pentagon, officials said that the U.S. Air Force will provide three unused facilities in West Germany to house as many as 980 East German refugees--a fraction of the tens of thousands who have crossed the increasingly porous borders to West Germany in recent days alone.

“It’s a dramatic happening for East Germany and, of course, for freedom,” Bush told a hastily assembled group of reporters in the Oval Office, with Secretary of State James A. Baker III seated nearby, and a loose-leaf briefing book opened to a map of Germany on his desk.

Throughout Thursday afternoon, stunned officials groped for explanations and an understanding of the potential long-range ramifications, while calling for stability in the face of rapidly moving change.

With free emigration, “this wall . . . will have very little relevance,” said Bush, whose six predecessors have overseen a U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Bloc built to a large degree around the symbolism of the East-West divide.

Nearly 2 1/2 years ago, then-President Ronald Reagan stood on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of divided Berlin, and called on Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

On Thursday, Bush said that while the Administration “imagined” open borders between East and West Germany, “I can’t say that I foresaw this development” at this point.

“Clearly, this is a long way from the harshest Iron Curtain days--a long way from that,” said Bush, who spoke in measured tones although he said that he was “elated” by the development. He added that others in the Soviet Bloc could no longer resist the pressure for change that was unleashed by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.

Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on East Germany not only to “tear down the Berlin Wall and the hundreds of miles of barbed wire fences along the border with West Germany” but to follow the lead of Poland and Hungary in moving toward democracy “so that the East German people can build a secure and free future without having to leave their homes.”

“The ragtag bag of Communists left trying to regain control are fighting a fight they can’t win: a fight against their own people,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

“This is the best news in Germany since the departure of Adolf Hitler,” said Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.)

Bush was told of the move in a report from the National Security Council’s situation room. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said later that the U.S. government had received no advance word of the decision and learned of it through news reports. The President conferred with Baker, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates, an expert on East-West relations, along with National Security Council experts on the Soviet Union.

Bush said that West Germany, to which 110,000 refugees have fled since August, would receive “the maximum help, if it was needed,” from the United States, although it has been able to do “a magnificent job” in handling the “enormous burden” that the flood of East Germans has brought so far.

Just how much help West Germany, one of the world’s richest nations, might require, however, is uncertain. “We’re not talking about Bangladesh,” said one government official.

The Pentagon said that the Air Force would make available an empty Air Force contingency hospital at Zweibrucken, in the Rhineland; a second vacant hospital at Donaueschingen in Baden-Wuerttemberg, and an apartment complex scheduled for renovation in Bitburg, also in the Rhineland.

The United States is providing the shelters in response to a request for aid from the West German Finance Ministry and the West German state governments of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, Pentagon officials said.

None of the buildings is within a U.S. military base, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said.

The American offer will allow the settlers to stay as long as six months, but reserves the right to reclaim the facilities for emergency use on five days’ notice, Williams said.

“Our assistance is limited to the use of these facilities only. No funds or personnel are involved,” he said. The United States will not pay to feed or clothe the temporary residents, he added.

The President’s call for East Germans to remain at home and improve their country echoed remarks June 30, when he told Eastern European interviewers on the eve of a trip to Hungary and Poland that his advice to young Poles would be to remain in Poland and take part in the “dynamic change” under way there.

Staff writers David Lauter, Michael Ross and John M. Broder contributed to this report.