Bonn’s Price For Reunification

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30961, 18 January 1966, Page 11

Bonn’s Price For Reunification

(N.Z P.A. Reuter —Copyright) BONN, January 17. West Germany might renounce nuclear weapons or the former German territories now controlled by Poland as the price for German reunification, a Bonn Cabinet Minister said yesterday.

Spelling out for the first time the sacrifices Bonn might be prepared to make for reunification, the Refugees Minister, Mr Hohann Baptist Gradl, told the news magazine, “Der Spiegel," these might be military, territorial, or economic.

Mr Gradl said in the interview that the Government would have to abandon favourite conceptions about defence and this might mean renunciation for a certain tvpe of weapon. He did not say whether he meant nuclear weapons.

Bonn is currently seeking a role in Western nuclear defence, in spite of bitter Communist criticism.

Mr Gradl said he personally believed "reunification can naturally be attained only in conjunction with a new system of European security.” He said the price for reunification could also be renunciation of German claims to eastern territories now under Polish Administration Until the German borders were finally settled in a peace treaty, the West German Government still recognised the border of 1937, when those territories were part of Germany.

But that did not mean that in the treaty the 1937 borders must be “restored absolutely as it were right down to the last full stops and commas,” he said.