Dr. Rolf Pauls, West Germany’s Ambassador to Israel, protested orally to Foreign Minister Abba Eban, at a conference here today, against a report that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had said that Bonn had definitely promised to provide $500,000,000 worth of economic aid to Israel at the rate of $50,000,000 a year.
The report was made in an interview with Premier Eshkol a week ago, when the latter was quoted as saying that the half-billion dollar figure had been mentioned specifically at a 1960 conference, in New York, between the leaders of the two governments at the time, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
After the conference between Dr. Pauls and Mr. Eban, it was stated that the talk was “useful” but that neither side had altered its version of the 1960 Adenauer-Ben-Gurion conversation. Dr. Pauls said he had wanted to discuss the matter with Mr. Eshkol but found the latter was not available. Today’s protest by Dr. Pauls, it was added, will not affect the current negotiations for German economic aid to Israel.
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