🇩🇪🤝🇮🇱 Germany covertly funneled billions into Israel’s nuclear ambitions – report

For decades, researchers have dug into Israel's Dimona reactor and its role in the country's secretive nuclear program that Tel Aviv has never officially confirmed.

But one question remained: who footed the bill?

A Haaretz report now claims that West Germany financed Israel’s nuclear project through a secret loan mechanism, transferring the equivalent of ~$5.7 billion from 1961 to 1973.

Hidden in plain sight

The plutonium-producing facility in the Negev Desert was started in the late 1950s with French help.

David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, sought more than French support, according to the report.

His choice fell on West Germany led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

🤡 Secrecy was essential: Ben-Gurion feared domestic backlash from open ties with Germany, while Germany worried open cooperation would anger the Arab world and boost East Germany.

A flurry of secret meetings involving Shimon Peres, then-director general of Israel’s Defense Ministry, West Germany's Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, Ben-Gurion and Adenauer finally sealed the deal in 1960, the report claims.

👉 Labeled “Negev development” and channeled through a Frankfurt state bank, the funds were officially described as loans to unnamed developing countries.

The capture and trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1960 alarmed West Germany, where former Nazis in Adenauer’s circle tied to Israel’s secret funding risked exposure, but this didn’t halt the program.

A subsequent repayment agreement in 1989 turned the loan, in practice, into a grant.

This covert German support may have been the hidden pillar that helped Israel build a nuclear program without relying solely on domestic resources or private donors.

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