East plays host to more top talks

Press, 19 December 1989, Page 8

East plays host to more top talks

NZPA-Reuter East Berlin The heads of State of East and West Germany have met for the first time on East German soil against a background of accelerating contacts between the two countries. The West German President, Richard von Weizsaecker, met Manfred Gerlach, of East Germany, in Potsdam, and three Bonn Government members talked politics in Leipzig and Halle. The contacts followed official trips to East Berlin last week by the West German Economics and Environment Ministers and came before today’s arrival of Helmut Kohl for his first official visit to East Germany. Up to 500,000 people are expected to turn out in Dresden to ~ee Dr Kohl who, according to

West German press reports, will arrive with proposals for a cash injection worth more than SUSSO billion over the next decade. Yesterday’s high-ranking visitors urged caution on the many East Germans now clamouring to be united with their bigger, richer brother. Mr von Weizsaecker, emerging from his talks in the building where the "Big Three” Potsdam Conference of 1945 split up the former Nazi Third Reich, said the two Germanies must demonstrate “a moral conscience.” • “It is in both our interests that our neighbours ... should not feel that the coming together of the two German States should give them cause for concern about their territory,” he told reporters after talks with Mr Gerlach.