Attempted assassination of Konrad Adenauer

Sudit alleged in their memoir that future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin had been involved in the plot, having approved and even financed it with his personal money.

I remember that at the beginning of the meeting Begin said that something had to be done against Adenauer and the reparations. I didn't know even who Adenauer was, but I agreed with Begin that this agreement should not be accepted

The claims were corroborated by Henning Sietz, an author who wrote a book in 2003 about the attempt. He told The Guardian;

Begin approved the assassination attempt. He obtained the money. He even took part in the planning right up until the last minute. Without him it wouldn't have happened.

At the time, Begin was a member of the Knesset and led the Herut party. He had previously been the leader of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist organization, and was vociferously opposed to the reparations, claiming in a speech that all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust.^[2] He found the mere idea of financial reparations to the Israeli government rather than the victims themselves for the murder of six million Jews to be grotesque, and although he was aware that the attempt was unlikely to succeed, he supported it in the belief that it would at least demonstrate the degree to which his party was opposed to the reparations, saying that it would "shake the conscience of the world".^[6] Begin's role was not known until after his death, and did not receive widespread media attention before Sietz's 2003 book.

• Attempted assassination of Leonid Brezhnev