On this day in 1952, West Germany and Israel agreed on a reparation deal and established relations. Menachem Begin led mass protests against the decision in honor of the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. The Reparations Agreement of 1953 stated that the Federal Republic of Germany was to pay Israel for the costs of “resettling so great a number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees” after the war, and to compensate individual Jews, via the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for their losses of Jewish livelihood and property resulting from Nazi persecution.It is estimated that the total value of plundered Jewish property amounted to about $6 billion. The government of Israel, however, did not rely on this figure. Their figure estimated the cost of resettling in Israel the 500,000 Jewish immigrants who, until the latter part of 1951, had immigrated from countries formerly controlled by the German Reich, was $1.5 billion.David Ben-Gurion and his political party took a practical approach and argued that accepting the agreement was the only way to sustain the nation's economy. At this time, Menachem Begin ordered the assassination of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which was carried out by Jewish terrorists utilizing a bomb plot that killed one person, but left Adenauer unscathed. Although Adenauer learned that it was an attempt on his life, he ordered investigations to be put on the back burner.Despite the protests, the agreement was signed in September 1952, and West Germany paid Israel a sum of three billion marks (about $714 million) over the next 14 years; 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress. The payments were made to the State of Israel as the heir to the victims who had no surviving families. The money was invested in Israel's infrastructure and played an important role in establishing the economy of the new state.