Administration Trying to Defend Stance on German Reunification : Foreign policy: Key senators, groups warn of the potential for return to militarism.

The Bush Administration, for months the international community’s leading advocate of German reunification, suddenly has found itself on the defensive as influential senators and the politically potent Jewish and Polish communities warn of the potential for renewed German militarism.

In an appearance before the Senate Budget Committee Wednesday, Secretary of State James A. Baker III was peppered with questions from members who expressed growing concern that a reunified Germany might become a military threat to its neighbors.

Some American Jewish leaders, while acknowledging that reunification is probably inevitable, have complained that it will erase the last dramatic reminder to the present generation of Germans of the horrors that were caused by Nazi racism and militarism.

Baker reiterated the Administration’s support for reuniting East and West Germany, calling it “a policy goal of ours for 40 years.” But the new doubts on Capitol Hill and elsewhere could dim the luster of the two-week-old agreement on a formula for unification talks that U.S. officials had hailed as a major diplomatic victory.

“It seems to me that (West German) Chancellor (Helmut) Kohl is hell-bent on becoming the first chancellor of a greater Germany, perhaps, since Adolf Hitler,” declared Senate Budget Committee Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.).

Sasser immediately insisted that he had not meant to compare Kohl to Hitler, but he then complained that the drive for unity “appears to be almost too rapid.”

Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) asked Baker if the Administration, before committing itself to reunification, had carefully considered the possibility that a reunified Germany might be taken over by “a very, very conservative group” that might “do a number of the things . . . that they have done twice in the (present) century.”

Baker replied, “We really did.” The comments bring into the open a fear that previously was seldom expressed so directly--that West Germany, a staunch North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally for four decades, might revert to its militaristic past if allowed to reunite with East Germany.

The focus of much of the current hand-wringing was Kohl’s refusal so far to offer assurances that a reunified Germany would not attempt to regain territory that was within its borders before World War II but now is part of Poland.

Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) introduced legislation expressing the “sense of Congress” that Poland and Czechoslovakia must be consulted closely before any decision is made on German reunification.

Simon, whose state contains a large Polish constituency, said in a letter to other senators: “While German unification clearly affects all of Europe, no other country is in the same situation as Poland.”

In Bonn, the West German government sought to dampen the furor Wednesday by announcing that Kohl is prepared to back a plan under which the parliaments of both West and East Germany would pass formal declarations pledging to respect the present German-Polish border.

Such declarations would defuse some of the opposition to reunification. But opponents harbor broader concerns as well.

Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, said in an editorial scheduled for the March issue: “A German reunification suffused with historical amnesia and fueled by a desire for economic growth and power is a mortal danger to the world.

“It’s not that I’m so worried about a new wave of anti-Semitism in Germany . . . (because) the Germans killed so many of us that there just aren’t enough remaining alive in that part of Europe for them to get worked up about,” Lerner wrote. “Rather, I resist the idea that Germans deserve reunification, that they’ve served their time and now can forget the past.”

Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, said in a telephone interview: “There is a great deal of apprehension and concern in the American Jewish community, just as there is in much of Europe for all of the obvious reasons. There is also a sense that German reunification is an inevitability, that one cannot prevent it. Short of preventing it, what people are struggling to define is the safeguards that can be built into the process that would allay these concerns.”

Burton S. Levinson of Los Angeles, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, agreed that American Jews have an emotional aversion to German reunification. But he said it would be a political mistake for them to try to stop it.

“We have more to gain by maintaining our good relations with Germany than in any way attempting to slow down what may be the inevitable,” he said in a telephone interview. “Israel doesn’t have a lot of friends. West Germany has been one of those friends. They have sold submarines to Israel. They paid reparations. They supported Israel in the United Nations. I think that affects my feelings.”

Kohl and other West German officials have made it clear that they resent much of the opposition to reunification. They believe such fears are based on ethnic prejudices that 40 years of West German democracy should have blunted.

But Siegman insisted that the history of World War II is too fresh to ignore.

“The German people are going to have to understand that this kind of concern is entirely to be expected,” he said. “They have an obligation to put these concerns to rest. They can’t do that just by saying this is ethnic prejudice.”