Henning Sietz, a journalist who has written a book about the plot, told the Guardian yesterday: "Begin approved the assassination attempt. "We thought the Germans should pay directly to the survivors of the Holocaust and that the government of Israel should not take the money from them in the name of the Jewish people and buy tractors with it for the kibbutzim." I didn't know even who Adenauer was, but I agreed with Begin that this agreement should not be accepted. "I remember that at the beginning of the meeting Begin said that something had to be done against Adenauer and the reparations. Mr Sudit said he was summoned to a meeting at Begin's Tel Aviv home. He clashed bitterly with Israel's Labour leader David Ben-Gurion, rejecting his talks with Germany for compensation for the Nazis' crimes against the Jews. Begin, who was to become Israel's prime minister between 19, was, after the war, incensed by Adenauer's offer to pay Israel compensation for the Holocaust. One of the alleged conspirators, Elieser Sudit, now 82, implicated Begin in a memoir written 40 years after the bomb went off.
French detectives arrested five Israeli people in Paris, all of whom were members of the Zionist group Irgun Tsvai Leumi, which Begin was linked to.
The bomb, arranged in March 1952, was detected before it reached Adenauer, but exploded killing a disposal expert and injuring two of his colleagues. The respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung claimed that the Zionist leader approved and helped organise the assassination attempt using a bomb hidden in an encyclopaedia, even offering to sell his gold watch as the conspirators ran out of money. Israel's former prime minister Menachem Begin was involved in a plot to blow up West Germany's first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, Germany's leading newspaper claimed yesterday.