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The Weimar Republic and British-Mandate Palestine

Carl Sunbourg

The relationship between the Weimar Republic and Palestine during the first half of the British Mandate rule scarcely draws much attention. The reasons seem obvious. Today, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust are the main points of departure for the discussion of German-Jewish relations. The debate of developments which took place before or after the years from 1933 to 1945 cannot be detached from this period.

However, when looking into the relationship between Weimar Republic Germany and Palestine of the 1920s, a number of interesting details come to light. This holds true, in the main, with regards to political and cultural affairs, and to a lesser degree economic exchange.

The last responses of Imperial Germany to the ‘Question-of- Palestine’ had been to:

• declare sympathy to the settlement of Palestine through the Zionist settlement movement,

• create an independent Department for Jewish-political affairs (Referat für jüdisch-politische Angelegenheiten) within the institutional structure of the German Imperial Office for Foreign Affairs, and

• establish of the ‘German Pro Palestine Committee’.

The last representatives of Imperial Germany had left Palestine for the more central parts of the Ottoman Empire a few days before the British conquest. Consequently, the framework for action of a German foreign policy in Palestine was tightly measured. Although Consul Kapp, the new German representative, had already arrived in 1918, the way for an independent German policy in Palestine remained blocked until the mid-1920s. In the meantime, Kapp was subordinated to the Consul-General of Spain.

Dr Erich Nord, Kapp’s successor, also restrained himself in order not to endanger the highly delicate relationship between defeated Germany and the new ruling power in Palestine, Great Britain. Nord, who had studied law and Oriental studies at the Imperial University of Berlin, was only first able to reopen an independent German representation in Palestine in 1926. Now acting as General-Council, he aimed to:

• secure German economic interests

• preserve a neutral political position in the emerging Arab-Jewish conflict

• support the Zionist settlement movement with sympathy, and

• serve the interests of the Templer movement, the small German community of Protestant missionaries from Swabia, who had come to settle in Palestine in the second half of the 19th century.

The first aim was - by comparison - still easy to realise because Germany was considered the fourth most important trade partner with Palestine after Great Britain, Egypt, and the United States. The value of commodities exported from Germany to Palestine increased between 1923 and 1926 from 5.4 million to 14.1 million Reichs Mark, and the Hamburg based German Levante Line was the leading shipping line among 30 different lines that regularly called at Palestinian harbours.

To preserve neutrality in an increasingly militant and violent conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine and at the same time to support the Zionist settlement project turned out to be like trying to square the circle.

In addition, the German community of Templers was in decline, and by the end of the 1920s its days were counted. The Templer community recovered only slowly economically after the First World War. When the community eventually arrived at the stage when further communal expansion seemed inevitable, they had to realise that the newly created constellation of power in Palestine did not allow for such a step. The Zionist settler movement had declared the purchase of land as one of their prime objectives. This not only further intensified the conflict over the distribution of resources among the inhabitants of Palestine in general, it led to a crucial increase of real estate prices that made it difficult for the Templers to expand their network of settlements.

The Department for Jewish-political affairs had an interesting history of its own. It had been the brainchild of Adolf Friedmann, Franz Oppenheimer and Moritz Sobernheim. According to their understanding the Department’s services for the German Foreign Office in Berlin aimed at the following main goals:

• providing information about the Jewish community and its various political currents and movements, as well as cultural and religious events of importance,

• coordinating the work of various Foreign Office departments that dealt with Jewish affairs, and

• trying to enlist the support and sympathy of foreign states and Jewish communities world-wide.

The Department had only formulated its own Palestine policy in 1924. This delay after the end of the War was caused in the main by the preoccupation of non-Jewish and Jewish interest groups in Germany with the events in central Europe. Germany had to yield large territories to the newly established Polish state in which many Jews lived. The Department was deeply involved in these events. Also, they tried to bring a German Jew into a prominent position in the ranks of the German foreign civil service. These attempts failed. Notwithstanding, however, Sobernheim officially travelled as the head of the Department to Palestine in spring 1925, in order to take part among other things in the foundation ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Sobernheim travelled the country and thus provided the first detailed reports from a German official on his impressions of Palestine. Given the fact that he mainly socialised in German-Jewish circles, these reports are one-sided and his remarks on ‘the’ Arab are biased. However, the Department became a limited success for the German-Jewish political elite. Sobernheim died in 1932 and in 1933 the Nazis closed the Department when they came into power.

The Duke of Bernstorff, the head of the German Pro Palestine Committee, saw a vital German economic and political interest in the economic development of Palestine. Social democrats, Zionists and Centrists agreed with him. The list of members of the Committee contained, among others, the names of Erich Nord, as well as the German representatives at the League of Nations, Ludwig Kastl and Julius Ruppel.

Berlin/Bonn in 1998