E. German Body Could OK Reunification, Experts Say : Europe: Return to one nation ‘could come more quickly than expected,’ Bundestag official says.

West German legal experts suggested Thursday that the reunification of Germany could be brought about by a simple vote of the new East German Parliament that is to be elected March 18.

Herbert Helmrich, chairman of the Legal Committee of the West German Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, said that Article 23 of the Federal Republic’s Basic Law, or constitution, makes it possible for East Germany easily to unite with West Germany.

“The people in (East Germany) must decide on this,” Helmrich said. “The Federal Republic must be prepared for the fact that reunification could come more quickly than expected.”

This view was echoed in Brussels by Manfred Brunner, chief aide to Martin Bangemann, vice president of the European Commission. Brunner said he has discussed the legal aspects of reunification with many experts in East Germany and West Germany. On the basis of these discussions, he said:

“I believe it is probable that immediately after March 18, the East German states, which legally never ceased to exist, will be reconstituted and will declare their accession to the Federal Republic.”

At the time of the Weimar Republic, 1919-33, Germany was divided into 16 laender , or states, five of them in what is now East Germany. The old states still exist in West Germany, but in East Germany they have given way to 15 bezirk e, or counties.

Some experts believe that reunification could come about with no vote of any kind. Article 23 of the constitution holds that the constitution applies to any part of Germany that expresses its desire for “accession.”

This means, according to a diplomatic legal adviser, “that if a new Volkskammer (the East German Parliament) expressed its wish for accession, East Germany would immediately become part of the Federal Republic.”

Technically, he said, members of the East German Parliament could then “walk into the Bundestag in Bonn and ask to be seated.”

Some observers have suggested that reunification might be a long, drawn-out legal process under the supervision of the Allied Powers of World War II--the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. In the absence of a formal peace treaty, these four nations retain some rights in Germany.

But many experts now lean to the view that, legally, reunification could be accomplished much more simply, though the West German government would prefer that the process be approved by its allies in the West and the Soviet Union as well.

In November, Chancellor Helmut Kohl proposed an elaborate, 10-point plan calling first for confederation, a limited step that would unite the two governments in the fields of foreign and military affairs, and eventually in a full federation.

But as Brunner, the European Commission official, put it: “It seems that the people of East Germany cannot and do not want to wait for the longer route. . . . They have had to trust state planning for 40 years, and now they want to act themselves.”

Kohl, who was described Thursday as preparing for his trip Saturday to Moscow to discuss the German question, is expected to reassure Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that a reunified Germany will pose no security threat to the Soviet Union. He will be accompanied on the trip by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

A West German official said: “Kohl and Genscher plan to assure the Soviet leadership in personal conversations that they are serious about their repeated assurances that Moscow’s security interests will be taken into account in the process of uniting the Germanys.”