Assassination attempt on Konrad Adenauer, Otto Küster and Franz Böhm
The attack on Konrad Adenauer with a letter bomb in 1952 went back to a controversy in Israeli politics over the reconciliation attempts between the Ben Gurion government and the West German Chancellor Adenauer .
In addition to the mailing addressed to Adenauer, other, smaller letter bombs had been sent to the German negotiating delegation in Wassenaar , namely Otto Küster and Franz Böhm , who helped negotiate the Luxembourg Agreement until 1953 . A confessional letter provided the background for the attempted attacks in the negotiations, which was also the subject of various press reports. In France , shortly after the attack, some of the people behind the attack, who belonged to the former Irgun Tzwa'i Le'umi and thus the right-wing opposition in Israel, were arrested and soon afterwards deported. Only Elieser Sudit was convicted of illegal possession of weapons and was imprisoned for several months. Jakob Farshtej and Elieser Sudit confessed to the attacks in Israel and published books and doctoral theses on them.
In Germany, the entanglements were again publicly discussed in 2003 due to a publication by Henning Sietz . In Adenauer's memoirs, as in the cabinet minutes published in 1989, only one brief note is devoted to each attack.
procedure
On March 27, 1952, the contents of a mysterious package exploded in the Munich police headquarters , which had been incorrectly addressed to Konrad Adenauer, not in the Palais Schaumburg , but in the " Bundeshaus Bonn ". Two boys had been hired by a man allegedly named Mario Mirelli to post it for him at the post office. Since the man had pleaded lack of time - he had to catch a train - but then followed the boys and watched them, they had suspected and handed the package over to the nearest police station.
As the sender information, the package bore the label "Prof. Dr. Erich Berghof, Frankfort.a / M, Bernheimer LandsTr. 26 ”, which, like the recipient's address, suggested that the writer was not very well versed in German politics or the associated language. The package contained a slipcase in which the second volume of the Kleiner Brockhaus from 1950 was. About 500 grams of explosives were hidden in this book , which exploded when demolition master Karl Reichert pulled the book out of the slipcase. Reichert died as a result of his injuries; two police officers were seriously injured and three others were slightly injured.
A letter of confession dated April 1, 1952, was received by various news agencies and was signed by an "organization of Jewish partisans ". The attack was justified with the reparation negotiations between the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel. Two other much smaller bombs were sent to the German negotiating delegation in Wassenaar near The Hague and were supposed to hit Otto Küster and Franz Böhm.
Arrests
In early April 1952, the French police arrested five Israelis in France in connection with the attack. Jakob Farshtej, Hermann Fekler , Itzchak Preger and Elieser Shostak could not prove anything, and only Elieser Sudit, in whose quarters weapons had been found, was sentenced to four months in prison in France and then expelled.
Reactions
The assassination attempt on Konrad Adenauer was just one of many actions that were launched by Germany against the payment of reparation money to Israel. Among other things, Begin, who belonged to the right-wing opposition to Ben Gurion's socialists, traveled to Paris in May 1952 to organize a boycott of German products, and then to the USA, where he also tried to influence public opinion. Dov Shilansky planted a bomb in the Israeli Foreign Ministry in October 1952, and Cherut members tried to organize actions against ships from Germany with deliveries of goods from underground.
Adenauer and his negotiating partner David Ben-Gurion tried to downplay these incidents whenever possible. According to the cabinet minutes released in 1989, Adenauer confirmed the reports on the letter of confession in the press and assumed an attempt to disrupt the burgeoning relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel. The two boys who had handed the package over to the police were received personally by Adenauer and each received a gold watch as a thank you. Among other things, an attempt was made to interpret the letter bombs as an act of a mentally deranged individual perpetrator. In the 1950s and 1960s there were other theories about the perpetrator (s) of the attack; among other things, an Eastern secret service was suspected. In 1978 the investigation was officially closed.
Renewed public awareness in Germany in 2003
In Germany, the evaluation of the investigation files, which was in the main state archive in Munich , was published again by the journalist Henning Sietz in his book Attentat auf Adenauer 2003.
The right-wing Junge Freiheit argued that Adenauer and Ben-Gurion had kept the background of the attack a secret and that it only came to light in 2003. However, this is neither coherent in terms of time nor can be inferred from contemporary or later interpretations of the quite extensive public discussion of the attacks. It is correct that there was a crisis in the Shilumim / reparation negotiations during the period in question and the disputes in Israel over the start of direct negotiations with West Germany, including injuries to individual Knesset members, for example through the use of tear gas and a three-month house ban for Menachem Begin led. It was important to both sides not to turn the investigation into a state affair. A discovery of the Israeli connection by German investigators, often with a National Socialist past, would not have been in the interests of both parties. Involvement of the Israeli opposition was known and publicly discussed long before Sietz's investigations.
background
The history of these events began in the same year. On January 7, 1952, Menachem Begin refused to accept the “blood money” of the Germans on Zion Square in Jerusalem and said: “This will be a war of life and death. There is no German who did not murder our fathers. Adenauer is a murderer. Every German is a murderer. "
According to the Israeli Haaretz , its former secretary Yehiel Kadishai as well as the director of the Begin Heritage Center , Herzl Marov, contradicted the statements of Eliezer Sudit regarding a direct involvement of Begin.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c When terror was still moral. In: Young Freedom . September 5, 2003, accessed November 23, 2016 .
- ↑ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : "The deed of a madman". The first study on the failed assassination attempt on Konrad Adenauer appeared 51 years later . In: Die Welt , July 11, 2003
- ↑ a b c d e f Henning Sietz, On behalf of conscience , on: faz.net, June 12, 2006
- ^ Protestantism and the social market economy Traugott Roser LIT Verlag Münster, 1998 - 368 pages
- ^ The cabinet minutes of the federal government: 1952. Volume 05 Oldenbourg Verlag, 1989, 838 pages.
- ↑ Jörg Bremer: Adenauer assassination fun twisting . Online at FAZ.net from June 15, 2006.
- ^ The bomb to the Federal Chancellor . Online at merkur-online.de from August 10, 2003.
- ↑ See the police investigations: Reinhard Scholzen : To protect the politicians. The early years of the backup group. In: Polizei & Wissenschaft 2, 2014, pp. 2–9. Here p. 4.
- ^ Henning Sietz: Attentat auf Adenauer , Perlentaucher.de, accessed on April 28, 2013
- ↑ The crisis of Shilumim / reparation negotiations in the summer of 1952 Yeshayahu A. JelinekVierteljahrshefte of Contemporary History 38. Vol. 1. H. (Jan., 1990), pp 113-139
- ^ Peter Y. Medding: The Founding of Israeli Democracy 1948–1967 . Oxford University Press, New York 1990. 268 pages.
- ↑ Haaretz Bombmaker tells Haaretz: Begin ordered hit on Adenauer , by Amiram Barkat June 14, 2006