The Nazi Lab in Palestine

By Steve Rodan

The first Nazi film evening in the Jewish community of Palestine took place at the Orient Theater in Jerusalem's German Colony in the summer of 1935. The Jews in the city were outraged by the celebration of the movement that promised to destroy them. They had been promised by their leaders that there would be a ban on Nazi films.

A few months later, the Nazis tried again. This time they were much bolder. In January of 1936, the Germans introduced a Nazi film in the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv. The film was called Eva, the Factory Girl, screened before an audience of German-speaking Jews who thought they were seeing perhaps a comedy classic. Many of them had escaped Hitler's hell just months ago. Again, there was outrage and Jewish cinemas were pressed to ban any film that lauded Hitler or the Third Reich.

The Zionist media, controlled by the British and Jewish Agency, kept silent during the Tel Aviv film festival. But when the festival closed and the Germans went home, the Palestine Post, with a large German readership, couldn't help but send a message to the Zionist leadership.

"Ever since the boycott of films came to a silent end, a certain number of German film products have been reaching Palestine under false colours," the Post said in an editorial on Feb. 2, 1936. "...It was of set purpose that we did not wish to publish this fact [of a Nazi film] as long as this product of the National Socialist spirit was to be seen in Tel Aviv. It was not our desire to incite any unruly elements of Tel Aviv to protest, but to call upon clear-headed and legitimate representatives of public opinion We trust that these will make their opinions, even post-facto, unequivocally obvious to those responsible in this case. For there is a limit to tolerance."

During the 1930s, Hitler made no secret of wanting to eliminate the Jews. But until he began the killings and deportations in earnest in late 1938, he used the Jewish community in Palestine as a laboratory for his Nazi regime. The experiment was conducted with the consent of the Zionist leadership and against the wishes of the Jewish population.

The Nazi entry into Palestine began even before Hitler gained power. In July 1932, Ernest Wilhelm Boule, the future head of the Nazi Party's Overseas Department, sent a letter to a German architect in Haifa named Karl Ruff, an admirer of Hitler. Support for the Nazis was rising within the tiny German community and the Arab majority. Around then, young Germans marched through the Jewish neighborhoods of Haifa chanting "Heil Hitler." The Jewish Agency as well as the British Mandate administration did nothing. Indeed, the Zionist leadership was quietly negotiating with the Nazis in Berlin on the terms of a future relationship.

When Hitler became chancellor, Palestine turned into a key foreign outpost for Nazi Germany. In November 1933, the German Propaganda Ministry sent an official to lecture in Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Sarona, the German colony just north of Tel Aviv. Ruff was appointed head of the Nazi network throughout the Levant, including Lebanon, Syria and what is today Jordan.

Membership grew rapidly. In 1932, there were only six Nazi Party members in Palestine. By the end of 1934, there were nearly 200 registered members, with Jerusalem containing the largest chapter. All of the Nazi leadership in Palestine came from the Templar Society, established in the 19th Century by elements from the deeply anti-Semitic Lutheran Church. The new Nazi network was built along the lines of the ruling party in Germany.

In 1935, Ruff was replaced by a much more efficient Nazi. Cornelius Schwarz wanted to turn Palestine into Germany's leading outpost in the Middle East. He didn't see many obstacles. The British were deep in their appeasement phase, and the Jewish Agency was bound by the Transfer Agreement, which allowed Hitler to persecute Jews, confiscate their assets and share some of it with the Zionists under the guise of immigration costs. The agreement marked a windfall for the Zionist movement, and by 1937, Germany became the most important exporter to Palestine, surpassing an alarmed Britain.

Berlin regarded Palestine, with no more than 2,500 Germans, as a "country group," far more important than India, Iraq or other British-ruled territories. Schwarz was invited to attend the Nazi Party conference where he met Hitler. At the same time, Hitler expanded relations with the Zionists as well. The Gestapo and SS maintained links with the Haganah both in Europe and Palestine and exchanged intelligence.

The result was a German campaign to infiltrate everywhere in Palestine. In March 1936, the Palestine Telegraphic Agency reported that two Nazi agents had left Germany for Palestine. Their mission was to whip up pro-Hitler sentiment among the Arabs and Germans. In May, an Austrian Jew who had converted to Christianity was arrested in Tel Aviv. The suspect, Paul Zoback, was said to have confessed to being a Nazi agent ordered to agitate the Arabs against the Jews and British. A year later, Adolf Eichmann, who would be regarded as the leading bureaucrat of the Holocaust, was sent to Palestine to meet Zionist and Arab leaders. [1]

In Jerusalem, the Germans organized a takeover of the U.S.-sponsored Young Men's Christian Association. In October 1933, soon after the Transfer Agreement was signed, 30 Nazis joined the YMCA and demanded the removal of what they said was a Jewish-dominated newspaper, Frankfurter Zeitung. Instead, the Nazis wanted the Voelkischer Beobachter, described in a YMCA memorandum as a "rabidly pro-Hilter Nazi publication." The demands were led by several Nazi agents.

Prominent Zionists on the YMCA board were urged by the Jews to quit. They refused. [2] Eventually, the YMCA became regarded as a Nazi base, in contact with both leading Zionists and British officials. [3]

The cooperation by the Zionist leadership with both local Nazis as well as Germany became repulsive to the Jewish community in Palestine. Hitler's persecution of the Jews in Germany was met by protests outside the German consulate in Jerusalem. Hitler was mocked in effigy during the Purim parade in Tel Aviv in 1935. When the Nazis burned Jewish books in Germany, the Jews, many of them recent immigrants, torched Nazi flags.

But no amount of Nazi persecution could change the minds of Zionist leaders. The Germans were seen as the Zionist ally in every respect. In December 1936, Zionist leaders pleaded with German consul-general Walter Dohle to appear before a British commission to express support increased immigration to Palestine. Dohle, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi who aided the Arab revolt, refused. [4]

"Whoever says that Hitler has decreased our power does not tell the whole truth," Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion told the World Council of Ihud Poalei Zion in July 1937. "The destruction of German Jewry has certainly weakened the Jewish people and reduced its political weight, but on the other hand -- it has also increased the pressure of Jewish distress, and Jewish distress is also a political factor."

Even after Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Jewish Agency refused to enforce a ban on Nazi films. On Hitler's birthday on April 20, 1939, the SS Anteres was covered with Nazi flags during its stay in Haifa's port. The fuhrer's 50th birthday was said to have received "special attention" in Palestine, with numerous foreigners arriving to celebrate. [5]

In the end, Hitler's efforts in Palestine paid off. German intelligence on Palestine was shared with the Italian Air Force in its bombing of Tel Aviv in 1940. As the Wehrmacht approached Palestine in the summer of 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler allocated no more than 24 agents to oversee what he hoped would be the extermination of 500,000 Jews. The Germans already had an extensive network in Palestine that could identify and round up the Jews.

In mid-1944, the SS used its intelligence network for Operation Atlas, meant to poison the water supply of Tel Aviv. A chief agent in the operation was Kurt Wieland, the former head of the Hitler Youth in Palestine. Wieland parachuted from a German plane and landed near Jericho.

By that time, however, the British had shut down the open Nazi network. Hundreds of suspected Nazis were deported to Australia until after World War II. Schwarz, the head of the network, was freed in a prisoner exchange with Germany that included a few dozen Jews selected by the Jewish Agency. In 1949, the new State of Israel took over Sarona and built the Defense Ministry and military headquarters. [6]

During Israel's war of independence in 1948, Jewish soldiers captured a building along the southern edge of Jerusalem near what is today Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. The building contained a large hall littered with documents. Hundreds of files were found that contained information by German agents. Many documents from these files had been pilfered, believed taken to the Spanish consulate on the eve of World War II. [7]

A few years later, some of Hitler's Nazis would return to Israel as West German diplomats and government officials. Under the reparations agreement, they would inundate the Jewish state with Nazi-inspired opera, films, history and goods. And the Nazi laboratory would start all over again.

Notes

1. Palestine Post, March 12, 1936 and May 17, 1936]

2. German newspaper controversy of January 1934 at YMCA. memo, Jan. 29, 1934

3."Rise of the Reich in Mandate Palestine: The NSDAP, Jerusalem YMCA and "Participation” of Attallah Kidess in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games (Part 2)" San Charles Haddad. Journal of Olympic History. Issue 3. 2020.

4. Germany and Zionism, David Yisraeli, Germany and the Middle East, 1835-1939 (1975), Page 15

5. Palestine Post. April 21, 1939. Page

6."When Nazis roamed freely in Haifa and Jaffa...this is no fiction" Colin Schindler. Jewish Chronicle. April 25, 2022

7."The Nazi Party in Palestine and the Levant, 1932-9" H.D. Schmidt. International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs. Vol. 28, No. 4 (Oct., 1952)

Below: Nazi Party leader in Palestine, Ludwig Buchhalter [circled] at Templer meeting.