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Templars who (most) became Nazi in the 1930s-40s - Fascinating 1957 article.Translated
Last edited Tue Mar 28, 2023, 03:38 PM - Edit history (7)
Before getting into the article, prior to Hitler's rise to power, relations between German colony Templars, and the Jews were friendly. It was afrer German Nazi propaganda infested and some came over with "material" that things changed.The TEMPLERS got on well with both Arabs and Jews until Buchhalter formed a branch of the Nazi Party in Jerusalem in 1934. This was followed by the outbreak of the three-year armed Arab revolt against the British Mandate in 1936 and Jerusalem Arabs happily saluted Templer architect and builder Hermann Imberger when he took his Sunday stroll wearing a swastika armband.
'Templer Town'.
By Meir Ronen, The Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2008
________
1934:
Batog – באטאג, 10 April 1934:
Hitler agitation in Palestine. Formed in E.Y. a center for Hitlerist propaganda in the Near East.
A Palestinian correspondent of Jewish newspapers abroad writes:
Recently, the relations between the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel [Eretz-Yisrael - E.Y.] and the German colonists in the country have become very strained.
In the Land there are a few thousand Germans / 'Templars', who have their own colonies. Before the Hitlerite revolution in the country... the relations between the Germans and Jews in the country were friendly.
As soon as the Hitlerites came to power in Germany, the relationship between the Germans and these Jews soon changed.
The Germans in the country, which is true, never wanted to employ any Jewish workers in their colonies. Although the main consumers of their agricultural products are almost exclusively Jews.
As soon as Hitler ascended the throne, Nazis = propagandists began to appear, who began to conduct anti-Semitism propaganda among the Germans in E.Y..
The agitation really soon bore fruit, the Germans became very aggressive and show full hatred towards the Jews in the country.
Some time ago, the Germans in E.Y. had invited to visit them, the Austrian Nazi-leader Herr Walter Riehl, he should hold a report cycle there on the essence of National-Socialism.
Walter Riehl used his visit to E.Y. for anti-Semitic propaganda and created in E.Y. a Nazi center for the entire East.
The German Hitlerites in Israel are already conducting a twisted Hitlerite propaganda among the Arab youth.
Among the Arab youth there is also a Nazi organization, which is led by the German Hitlerites in the country.
Recently, with every German ship that arrives in Jaffa or Haifa, literature is brought in, which is then distributed among the Arabs in the country.
The danger of the Hitlerites in the Land of Israel is still not great for the time being, but the Jewish community must start thinking about how to fight the guys.
________
Yedidia Mardan tells about strange meetings: 'Hermann Imberger'
Davar, Nov 1, 1957, pages:
8,12
When I was transferred in 1937 to the police in the German colony in Jerusalem, the people were saying that Hermann Imberger carried the number 1 certificate of the Nazi Party branch in the city. His extensive experience in the problems of the Land of Israel, and especially his connections with the Arabs, made him a highly respected agent of Nazi espionage. But he was also the last Nazi in the Land of Israel. And his eyes still dimmed in their sockets when he saw the establishment of the State of Israel from which he was expelled.
Imberger was an engineer, and under his influence young Arabs were sent to study engineering in Germany. They would return imbued with admiration for the "Fuhrer" and Nazism and in their hearts a wild hatred for the Jews. Upon their return to Israel, they continued to concentrate around the lame Imberger, who served as an advisor to the Arab Revolt movement.
During the year and a half of my service at the police station in the German colony, I wondered about the strange fact, how the British government and the Jewish community put up with the existence of an open Nazi nest in the Imberger house that stood in front of the police.
The house had green shutters and a red tiled roof. And apparently there was no difference between it and the houses of the other Germans. It was surrounded by a wide and incredibly clean yard. To the right was an ornamental garden, and at the end of the yard was the large carpentry.
The police said that Imberger used to appear on the streets with all the Nazi arrogance. On Sundays of the week he had a ribbon with the swastika decorating his arm. When he entered the police station (mostly in matters of the German community), the British smiled at him with forgiveness and the Arabs saluted him with admiration.
In the course of time, the house with the green shutters became the center where the aid strings that the Germans provided to the Arab rebels in 1936-1939 were tied.
From the open window I would see in the living room of the house a picture of Hitler on which the Führer had written with his own hands: "To the faithful son of the motherland, Hermann Imberger, — from Adolf Hitler."
In September, 1939, two days after the invasion of Poland by the German army, I was sent to arrest the German citizens in the German colony, who that day by virtue of the circumstances became subjects of an enemy country.
When I entered Imberger's house, I found it empty. I walked through it and my eyes came across a picture of Hitler. I went to the wall, removed it and threw it on the floor. "How dare you? - Thundered suddenly heard a voice behind me. At the door stood Hermann Imberger, pale and trembling in his bosom, and his eyes were half-open.
"No longer will Hitler's picture be displayed in Jerusalem - I said - and you come with us, Imberger. Now you will taste the taste of a concentration camp. Get in the car. "At that moment his family members entered, they also looked shocked at the sight of Hitler on the floor. Imberger was the last to get on the car, saying: "Nothing, in a month I'll be back home. You don't know the strength of Germany." But 10 years passed until Imberger returned and was able to enter his house. All those years he was imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences in a concentration camp for Germans. He did not break even after the Reich collapsed, and in April 1945 he eulogized the soul of the "Führer" at a memorial in Wilhelma.
At the end of World War II, Imberger once again trusted in the generosity of the British and believed that they would return him and the other Germans to their lands, as happened after World War I. But this time things were not so smooth. The Jewish community in Palestine, whose blood of six million brothers called for revenge, could not bear a Nazi on its land, and threatened acts of reprisal. When the British showed a tendency to disregard this warning, bullets pierced the skull of Gotthilf Wagner, the head of the German community in Israel. When the fighting broke out between the Arabs and the Jews, Imberger believed - as he told me afterwards - in the quick downfall of the Jews.
I did not believe that Jews could hold out against six Arab countries.
And that is why he was one of the few Germans who answered Fuller, the last British governor of the "Lod" district, who came near the British evacuation to Wilhelma and suggested that the Germans move to Cyprus: "No, sir, I was born in Jerusalem and my place is there. The Jews will never conquer the city. I will ask you to take me to my house."
As soon as the British left the country, the immigrants fled to the "German Hospice", the German guest house in the neighborhood. The Red Cross flag was flying on the building, and here, through the windows shaking from the shell explosion, Imberger saw the Jewish youths coming down from Talbiya Hill, through the rocks, towards the houses of the German colony.
This is how Hermann Imberger entered the sphere of the Jewish government. However, the Jews did not take revenge on him for his crimes, and even if they knew everything about him, they returned him to his home and allowed him to open his carpentry shop again, until the deportation, which was not long in coming.
Evening twilight fell on Jerusalem while I was standing in front of Imberger in his carpentry shop. It was two weeks before he was about to leave the country for Australia in order to never return to the city where he was born. All around, in the German colony, Jewish life flourished and Imberger felt very alone.
He lowered his eyes when I asked a few questions:
"Please, ask, I have nothing to hide."
"Being active in the Nazi party here, did you also act against Jews"?
"I was not always on good terms with Jews."
And added muttering: "We, we received instructions from Berlin that we must continue to maintain good relations with the local population."
And so you helped the mufti gangs, repaired their weapons, collected money for them"?
His eyes were lowered even more. Darkness prevailed in the carpentry. I asked him to turn on the electricity. He did so unwillingly.
I continued:
"How did you feel when the news reached you that your friends were destroying the Jewish people"?
"I was then - under arrest. I didn't believe these reports, I thought they were propaganda of horror."
"Do you know of any young Germans from the Land of Israel who were in the SS service?"
"Most of the German youth from Palestine moved to Germany before the war to enlist in the Wehrmacht. I don't know in which divisions they served."
"Would you like it to rise again - the Nazi movement?"
He sank into prolonged contemplation:
"I want their glory and greatness to be returned to Germany. I love the motherland."
"And all that was?"
"Forgive, sir, forgive — One must understand the other..."
_________
Following is a translated intrudction by Gideon Housner (1913-1990: widely known for heading the team of prosecutors at the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961) to Haviv Kanaan (who was a policeman, in Feb. 1937 stationed at the Templars) 1968 book on what the Templars' behavior can tell:
Kanaan, Haviv, The Nazi Fifth Column in Palestine 1933-1948. [Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz HaMeuchad, 1968.
Pages 11-14 *
*:
Introduction
As we know, the Nazis came to power thanks to the free decision of the German people, who voluntarily made themselves a partner in the work of Adolf Hitler. The main points of the political and social program of the Nazis were known to all at that time, since the things were put in writing by the Nazis themselves a few years before millions of German voters voted for them in general elections. Therefore, the question arises as to how it happened that a people living in the heart of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century, could flock to this leader, cheer him on to support his political and military struggle and finally stand up to his side as one man in a world war.
This question is particularly serious regarding the period that preceded Germany's entry into the Second World War, since during the war itself they could claim that they had silenced their conscience for the needs of the homeland, which was in danger. But what brought them to support Hitler until these days of emergency?
There is no uniform answer to this question. In today's Germany, many claim that it was a period of national blindness: the people were fooled by the lies of Rodan who knew how to charm them with demagogic persuasion, who excelled in his ability to expose and exploit every human weakness and silence the voice of criticism and reason. If it weren't for the humiliation of Jose Versailles, and if it weren't for the unfortunate party feud and if it weren't for mass unemployment - there certainly wouldn't be millions of supporters of National Socialism, but after the Nazi gang came to power, they repressed all their opponents with a strong hand through concentration camps and the Gestapo's regime of terror.
This explanation therefore hangs the collar on the external conditions only, the accidental combination of which made the German people lose their minds and failed to such an extent that they surrendered their country to the devil. According to this opinion, the Germans were also Hitler's "victims", but the German people in themselves are not inclined to a tyrannical regime, to militarism and hatred of others; These qualities are not inherent in his character or mental tendencies, nor any other people, if they were put in similar circumstances, would, in the opinion of those of this opinion, have failed, the way the Germans failed.
Indeed, it is not easy, usually, to test the truth of explanations and the correctness of historical hypotheses, which are conditional on a hypothetical condition. They are not given
For testing by replaying the events. We do not know what would have happened "if" or "if not". History is not an animal laboratory, where any experiment can be repeated by adding factors or removing them, in order to prove what the difference is in the reaction. That is why other ways must be taken to examine the truth of theories and hypotheses about developments in the Chronicles.
The issue of Germany and the rise of Nazism in its vicinity is of secondary importance to such an examination, the purpose of which is not only to explain a powerful historical event that shocked the world and significantly influenced the course of its history. Such an examination, if successful, will even reveal whether the German people are indeed devoid of a dangerous desire for arrogance, conquest, and oppression of others and that they are no more affected by such tendencies than other nations. Any delving into this issue might also teach the world how to treat Germans - in the present and in the future.
For such a study it is important to focus on the reaction to the Nazi challenge of millions of Germans who lived outside Germany, in the free countries, who were not subject to any demagogic "dazzle" and the "crushing" effect of propaganda, the hand of the Gestapo was short of reaching them and in their free environment there were plenty of ways to stand up to the lies it preached of National Socialism.
...could have immuned them from the scourge.
After all, such a German who lives in a democratic environment, reads multi-faceted newspapers and sees the reality in the free countries up close. Such a person would not have joined the Nazis unless he had strong nationalism in his heart, without needing the propagandistic "persuasion" tools that acted directly on the peoples that were in Germany.
If so it was permissible to expect that under these conditions there would be only a few Germans in foreign countries who would rake in the murky brown current.
And here in fact the complete opposite happened.
Substantial parts of the German diaspora in the world enthusiastically joined the National Socialist Party, volunteered to act in its favor, openly and secretly, spied for it in their countries of residence and even voluntarily traveled to Germany to serve in the ranks of the SS.
And all this before World War II. In this respect, the events of the small German settlement in Mandatory [Palestine] Israel, which numbered about two thousand people, are particularly instructive.
These were the descendants of the Templars, members of a reform religious sect, the "Society of the Temple", who left Germany about a century ago with the desire to renew their religious life. They set their sights on a simple way of life, according to God's laws, they wanted to live in the land of Jesus, to adhere to the ways of the apostles and serve as a model, by their personal example, for Christian behavior.
Shortly after them, the pioneers of Jewish settlement settled in Israel. The Templars saw the Hebrew settlement in its formation and could follow its ways and motives. First and foremost, they could prove with their own eyes that the pioneers of the Jewish people came to live a life of work, to settle the wilderness of the land and to maintain a society based on advanced human values. They clearly saw that the existence of the Jewish settlement was in fact a complete contradiction of what Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg and other ideologues of Nazism had alleged about the Jews and Judaism.
Although any objective look at the life of the Jews of Germany itself could conjure up the lies of the Nazis. But here in Israel a new dimension was added to the Jewish identity, a dimension of manual labor and a life of labor, which the Nazis claimed were the opposite of the aspirations of the Jew. Here in Israel, all the terrible fiction in the "stories" about the Jew stood out to the eye, "[as if]a parasite" who, according to Hitler, has no desire to build an independent society or his own state and who pretends to have national ambitions, while his real object is always [Hitler:] "to deceive" the Gentiles and exploit them - [stood out to the eye - of its falsehood].
The daily life of the Jewish community has lost ground under these evil words. Anyone with open eyes and an open heart could easily stand that there is not a single word of truth in all the Nazi lies. And the Templars came in constant contact with the renewed Jewish identity, visited colonies and kibbutzim and saw how the first Hebrew city, Tel Aviv, was built next to their colony of Sarona.
They envisioned the essence of a people longing for creativity and renewal. And yet, they also followed Hitler and his teachings, and even among them the process of Nazi-fication deepened until it encompassed almost all of them.
In the referendum of 1938, in which Germans from abroad also participated, about 1200 Templars boarded a German ship docked in the port of Haifa and 99% of them voted "for the Fuhrer", while those gathered cheered "Zig Heil" in the well-known Nazi style.
In Israel, the Templars started collaborating with the Arab gangs who engaged in extensive terror operations against the Jewish community in 1936-39.
Although outwardly the Germans were "neutral" in this conflict, in fact they sympathized with the Arabs and provided them with shelter, food, weapons and money. In doing so, they laid the foundation for the Nazi-Arab partnership, which matured during the war years into a real alliance between the leader of the rioters, Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the leaders of Germany, who promised the mufti to crown "liberated Palestine", after it had been cleansed of the Jews.
The mufti reserved him self experts from Eichmann's department in the Gestapo, in order to carry out this task of exterminating the Jews of Palestine.
Arab-Nazi partnership in this format did not materialize since the Germans were defeated in the war, but it received a very tangible expression in Egypt, where some of the SS criminals found refuge. The big ones who immediately occupied and continue to occupy there central positions in the government apparatus.
Egypt has never handed over a single Nazi criminal to be prosecuted. The Egyptian anti-Jewish propaganda apparatus was also built in the format of the Hitlerite apparatus. Here, too, institutes for the "study of Judaism" appeared, publishing poisonous literature against the Jews, their religion, their culture and their nationality. Fake material and fiction, such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", are also used here, as in Nazi Germany before, mandatory material to be studied in schools.
This is the last incarnation of the Nazi Nasserite partnership, which first emerged among the Templars in the Land of Israel and whose early stages Haviv Canaan points out in his book.
As a security man, the author had access to and dialogue with this movement in Israel, but he also followed it as a journalist, that is, as a historian of the present. The world began to hear about the concentration camps, the persecution of the Jews and their dispossession from any position in Germany.
Now one could expect that every person with a shred of humanity in his heart would disapprove of this filth and turn his back on it. Instead, Canaan saw how the pictures of the Nazi leaders appeared like mushrooms on the walls of the Templars' houses in Jerusalem. Their local newspaper began to be full of Nazi propaganda in the style of Streicher and the organization of their party in Israel was built in the format of Nazi party cells all over the world.
Today there are no more Templars in our country. Some of them returned to Germany, and some of them immigrated to Australia. Today they disavow the false doctrine they once worshiped and reformed, which still bears its traditional name: "The Temple Guard", again prophesies in a different style. Did the members of the sect repent and finally recognize the truth and stand up to the Nazi lie, or did they walk away from it only because their idol, which failed to carry out its plan, disintegrated before their eyes? The author tries to answer this question as well. His factual and documentary research is an important addition to the research literature on the growth of Nazism and its spread in the world. After all, we Jews have a special interest in revealing the whole truth about Nazism, including that branch that developed in Israel, right at our fingertips.
___
Gideon Hausner, Chol haMoed Sukkot, 5728. Oct/68
________
Wilhelm Eppinger & Gottlieb Bohrle: the Good Templars
VS
Monstrous Ludwig Buchalter the Nazi who terrorized Templars who didnt toe the Nazi line
(Excerpts from a long piece)
Dalia Karpel, Haaretz, Feb 28, 2008:
"Swastikas in Jerusalem"
In 1933, a branch of the Nazi party opened in Jerusalem's German Colony. Members greeted each other with the straight-armed salute, waved flags emblazoned with swastikas and cut off business ties with their Jewish neighbors. In a new book, architect David Kroyanker tells of anti-Semitic propaganda and plans to import weapons from Germany for use by Arabs against the Jews...
in the 1930s, a branch of the Nazi Party operated openly in this pastoral neighborhood, established by the Templers, who belonged to a messianic religious cult that came to the Holy Land from Germany in 1868. How many of them were Nazis? Were they just a tiny minority, as Templer scholar Alex Carmel claims? German journalist Ralf Balke researched the matter and found that in 1939, the Nazi Party in Palestine had 350 members, out of a total of 2,100 German inhabitants...
Kroyanker, an architect and researcher who worked on this project with his wife Leora, devotes a chapter of the book to the Nazi period: "In the Shadow of the Swastika: 1933-1939." In addition to previously published materials, like the writings of journalist and author Haviv Canaan, Kroyanker relies on new, compelling sources from private archives, such as Templer manuscripts and memoirs published in Australia in German, and adds rare photographs that are being publicized for the first time...
Kroyanker stresses in his book that until Hitler came to power, the Templers and their Jewish neighbors enjoyed good relations. The Germans patronized the Jews' shops and went to Jewish doctors, while Jewish business owners stocked products from Germany and the cinemas screened German films. There were also partnerships between businessmen and merchants from the two communities.
Not all the Templers were swept up in the nationalist fervor after the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. There were some, primarily from the older generation, who worried about Nazi ideology taking precedence over the Templer ideology of messianic longings and the striving to create a Christian religious utopia. Kroyanker quotes an article from the Templer journal Warte, which criticizes Nazi ideology, saying "It ought not to be viewed as Christian, since it is founded on an Indo-German faith that leads to idol worship." But that didn't stop the growing support for Nazism.
Heil Hitler
The founder of the Nazi organization in Palestine in 1933 was the architect Karl Ruff, from Haifa. Nazi party branches were established in Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem and in several other Templer colonies. The Jerusalem branch was the largest; in April 1934, it had 67 registered members (the Haifa branch had 48). Ludwig Buchhalter, a teacher in the Templer school in the German Colony, was appointed head of the branch; he received instructions from Berlin and worked in coordination with the German consulate.
In April 1934, Buchhalter hosted a party for local residents at the party headquarters in Jerusalem to celebrate Hitler's birthday. The event began with a performance by the boys choir from the Schneller orphanage. "After that, Buchhalter, the branch leader, called for everyone to honor the 45-year-old fuehrer with a triple Sieg Heil salute. Of all the fuehrer's qualities, he emphasized the man's humility." Buchhalter also read aloud a chapter from the book "With Hitler on the Road to Power."
On May 1, 1934, the consulate hosted a festive reception and "it was decided that the members were now obliged to greet one another with a Heil Hitler greeting and straight-armed salute on the street, too, on condition that the greeting would not be interpreted as a provocation to others." Buchhalter summoned the party members to the Sport Club in Katamon, for a meeting with the chairman of the Nazi party in Stuttgart, who had come for a visit. That location was also used for lectures by professional Nazi propagandists, who promised their listeners that victory was assured and that they need only be patient.
Until 1934, a British branch of the Scouts operated in the German Colony and held varied activities, for boys and girls separately. The youths went on hikes and erected tent camps in the Wilhelma Templer colony, learned Morse code, knot-tying and first aid, and sang British songs. In 1934, the club was converted to a branch of the Nazi youth movement, the Hitler Jugend.
Haviv Canaan, who was an officer in the Mandate police at the time, described in his writings what Kroyanker calls "a typical National Socialist street scene in the second half of the 1930s": "Visible through the open windows of the mostly one-story houses was old but distinguished furniture, and the walls were adorned with pictures of leaders of the Reich. On the sides of the balconies, under the roof, swastika flags lay folded."
The architect and builder Hermann Imberger used to stroll down the Colony's main street every Sunday, with a swastika band around his arm, and the Arabs he passed "saluted him with admiration."
The residents, wrote Canaan, who were almost all Templers, "gazed with curiosity upon the new policeman who came to guard their safety, and it was obvious that they were uncomfortable with the fact that this policeman was a Jew. I clearly sensed looks of scorn and incredulity. A few days later, I noticed that when they passed by me, the German residents would salute each other with a loud 'Heil Hitler' and a Nazi salute."
Kroyanker also tells about the resistance that existed within the community to the Nazi activity: Philip Vorst, head of the Templer Association, banned the Nazi salute from the schools in 1935. Hala Sakakini and her sister, daughters of the renowned educator Khalil Sakakini, attended the Templer school, and Hala wrote about it in her memoir "Jerusalem and I: A Personal Record," which was published in English in 1990: "In 1935, secret gatherings of the German students began happening. Within a few months, the gatherings became open and full of fervor. We soon learned the names of the groups to which they belonged - the boys in the Hitler Jugend and the girls in the League of German Girls. They had symbols and a special uniform that was ordered from Germany."
Haviv Canaan described in his memoirs how frightened he felt when he saw "members of the Hitler Jugend practicing signaling and hand-to-hand combat in the rocky fields of the Katamon neighborhood. The British would just shrug their shoulders and say: 'It's Scouts. Why not?' At the time, I saw this minority with its arrogant pride and its worship of the fuehrer, how ecstatic it became at the sound of every hysterical screech on the German radio, celebrating the conquests of the Saar, Memel, the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia."
Ban versus ban
During the Arab revolt against the British, which began in April 1936 with a general strike that lasted six months, some Arabs saw the Templers as prospective allies in their struggle, and hoped that Nazi Germany would conquer Palestine from the British. Buchhalter told the German journalist Ralf Balke, whose book about the Nazi party in Palestine was published in 2001, how he would travel without any problem in his car, which had a Nazi flag attached, through areas that were under Arab control. And that once, when he forgot to remove the flag from the car, he "entered an area under Jewish control and came under fire from Jewish vehicles."
Sakakini writes that the German children were sympathetic to the Arabs and, during recess, would throw stones at the Jewish buses that passed the school. But the school principal, Wilhelm Eppinger, refused to join the Nazi party. In October 1937, when it was decided that the school was to be merged with the school of the city's German Evangelical community, Eppinger was dismissed and replaced by Philip Vorst, who by this point was going along with the Nazis. Vorst exhorted the parents, students and teachers who assembled for the school's grand opening to cooperate with one another in keeping with the lofty spirit of Adolf Hitler. The school had 89 pupils then: 51 Germans, 27 Palestinians and the rest a mixture of Britons, Austrians and Americans.
In her book, Sakakini described the changes that occurred in the curriculum. Young teachers recited political and patriotic poems to the students. The German Ministry of Information and Propaganda encouraged Palestinian students to attend the German school in order to create a cadre of pro-German leadership that would govern an independent Palestinian state in the future, reports Kroyanker, quoting from a document in the state archives. Palestinian pupils made up about a quarter of the student population and were also able to study Arabic there.
Buchhalter, the head of the local Nazi branch, used to threaten residents of the Colony who didn't adhere to the Third Reich's anti-Semitic demands. Because of the attacks on Jews in Germany, the Jews in Palestine declared a ban on German businesses. Architect Gottlieb Bohrle, a German Colony resident, was a partner with Matthaus Frank and Eliezer Lipman, a Jew, in a business on Bethlehem Road that sold lumber and coal. Bohrle was also the owner of the Orient Cinema. In late 1934, the Jewish cinema owners in Jerusalem, including the proprietors of the Edison, Zion and Eden cinemas, together with their counterparts from Tel Aviv and Haifa, appealed to the film distributors in the country and to the committee that imposed a ban on the screening of German films, arguing that Bohrle was "an agent of Hitler."
Bohrle hired the services of a Jewish attorney, Dr. Mordechai Buchsbaum, who demanded that the cinema owners withdraw their claim, "in view of this accusation having been made solely for commercial purpose in order to be rid of a new competitor, despite your knowledge that Mr. Bohrle has no connection whatsoever with Hitler's agents and that he has proven throughout his life and by all of his actions that he has no connection with haters of Israel. Your action has caused offense to my client and is liable to cause him further damage and losses."
The management of the Zion Cinema responded immediately: "We hereby inform His Honor that we never thought to insult anyone, and Mr. Bohrle in particular, whom we do not know at all; and it is only from the above letter that we learned that the aforementioned person runs a cinema in Jerusalem. In our opinion, the expression 'an agent of Hitler' is not a term of insult, and if Mr. Bohrle is offended by this expression, then we greatly regret it and ask his pardon."
Business with Jews
About a year later, Bohrle rented out the cinema to Eitan Belkind, who continued to operate it after changing its name to Efrat. Bohrle got himself in trouble with his Nazi neighbors, too. In January 1936, he received a threatening letter from Buchhalter: "The local leadership of the National-Socialist party was astounded to learn of the rental of your cinema to Jews. In this context, we direct your attention to the fact that the sale of German property within the German Colonies currently requires permission from the party's Foreign Organization, and this applies in any case concerning a sale to non-Aryans with German citizenship."
Buchhalter noted that he was sending copies of his letter to the party leader in Germany and to the party's Foreign Organization:
"In this regard, you should take note of the potential consequences of your moves for you and your family. In the hope that you, as one of the nation, place the interests of your nation above your own, in accordance with the fuehrer's principle of 'the common good before the individual good.'
Signed: Heil Hitler!, Ludwig Buchhalter, branch director."
At the end of his letter, Buchhalter adds: "P. S.: We ask that you keep this letter confidential, and ensure that it does not come into Jewish hands."
This bit of correspondence was found amid the extensive estate of Aryeh Gini, an architect who worked in the Jerusalem municipality and dealt with city planning until the 1990s. His father perished in Auschwitz, and he was raised by his grandfather, Ben-Zion Gini, who was the first city engineer in Jaffa, starting in 1911, and then the city engineer in Jerusalem, from 1917 on. Aryeh Gini collected documents, maps, letters and photographs related to the city and to the Templers. Some of the photos and letters published in Kroyanker's book come from his archive, which is now in the possession of his widow and his son, television and radio personality Yoav Ginai.
Gottlieb Bohrle is one example of a Templer who refused to join the ranks of the Nazi party. In a letter he sent to his attorney, Buchsbaum, in August 1950 from Australia, where the British had exiled the Templers during World War II, he wrote that his home and his assets, including the cinema, had been confiscated and transferred to the custodian of absentee property. He asked Buchsbaum, who was also his friend, to try to rescue his property. He repeatedly declared that he had never been a Nazi, that he had opposed the Nazi regime and even received threats from the Nazi party branch. He added that he was treated like a traitor because he refused to fly the Nazi flag in front of his cinema.
From the letters in Gini's collection, from which Kroyanker quotes, it appears that Bohrle declined to screen Nazi propaganda films in his cinema, and that the Jerusalem Nazis responded by banning people from patronizing his business, which brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. After his daughter married a man who was opposed to the Nazi ideology and even invited some of his Jewish friends to their wedding, the Templer community informed him that his presence was no longer desired at the Sunday prayer services.
Beginning in 1935, the Nazi party branches in Palestine instructed the Germans not to employ Jewish workers, and also recommended dissolving any business partnerships with Jews...
Enemy property
Ludwig Buchhalter reported to the Nazi leadership in Berlin about the possibility of selling two German properties to Jews - the buildings of the Bikur Holim compound and the Schneller orphanage. Kroyanker has also written a fascinating article, as yet unpublished, about the sale of these properties.
Kroyanker says the first structure in the Bikur Holim compound is the impressive building of the former German hospital, which was built in the late 19th century by a Christian order of nuns. The monumental building was designed in the style of public buildings in southern Germany, and features a charming bell tower in the center. "My position is not to oppose the sale of the existing hospital, since no one will be harmed by this," Buchhalter wrote to Berlin on January 4, 1936. "On the contrary, a future profit could be made by selling it to Jews ... A similar problem is the sale of the Syrian orphanage (Schneller), which is also completely surrounded by Jews ... Both of these institutions would benefit from a successful sale, which would make it possible for them to be rebuilt outside the city."
Representatives of the Zionist movement, writes Kroyanker, wanted to explore the possibility of buying the hospital. The architect Wilhelm Hecker, who was active in the movement's institutions and served as an advisor to the National Committee (Hava'ad Haleumi), wrote on August 11, 1937 to Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, then president of the National Committee: "I have just received a letter from the president of the aforementioned hospital, from Germany, and she will soon return to Palestine and then it will be possible to conduct negotiations on this matter ... It will be possible to buy the lot of the German hospital cheaply."
That same year, Dr. Eberhard Gmelin, director of the German hospital, who was also active in the local Nazi party, began dismissing the Jewish doctors who worked at the hospital. In the end, the Zionist movement did not purchase the building, which remained in the Germans' hands until the outbreak of World War II, and then became "enemy property." From that point on until the establishment of the state in 1948, it functioned as a hospital of the Mandatory government.
The Schneller complex, which has housed a large military base since the end of World War II, is now one of the most valuable real estate assets in the city. The compound, which abuts the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Geula and Mea Shearim, comprises about 150 dunams and includes, in addition to several buildings of historical and architectural value, open areas intended for construction of new residential neighborhoods for the ultra-Orthodox. Because of an ongoing dispute between the army and the Israel Lands Administration, says Kroyanker, none of the many plans for the site that have been proposed over the past 30 years have been put into effect, and the area remains untouched.
Kroyanker:
"In 1860, Johann Ludwig Schneller, a Protestant German missionary, founded the 'Syrian Orphanage,' which became a well-reputed educational-philanthropic institution, primarily because of the professional training it provided to the youths who resided there, most of whom were Christian Arabs. In the 1930s, the Schneller institution also became a center of Nazi activity in Jerusalem. Ernst Schneller, the founder's grandson, represented the Augusta Victoria Foundation here at that time, which worked to promote German nationalism. The Schneller printing house produced the Nazi party stationery and party members were entitled to a 10 percent discount. Because of the Schneller family's Nazi ties, the British secret police eavesdropped on their telephone conversations, and monitored their movements."
...In 1938, a booklet published by the Schneller institution included an article by Ludwig Schneller describing the feeling of "suffocation" at the German institution due to the proximity of Jews in the surrounding area, and expressing some blatantly anti-Semitic views...
Schneller's plan never came to pass. Buchhalter .. "Until his dying day, he never regretted a thing. As part of the reparations agreement, the Templers received compensation from the State of Israel. Buchhalter got $60,000 for his house in the German Colony."
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The gloating hellish Nazi Gotthilf Wagner
Bergman, R. (2019). Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. United States: Random House Publishing Group, pp. 16-17:
The leader of the Templers in Palestine was a man named Gotthilf Wagner, a wealthy industrialist who assisted the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo during the war. A Holocaust survivor by the name of Shalom Friedman, who was posing as a Hungarian priest, related that in 1944 he met Wagner, who "boasted that he was at Auschwitz and Buchenwald twice. When he was in Auschwitz, they brought out a large group of Jews, the youngest ones , and poured flammable liquid over them. 'I asked them if they knew there was a hell on earth, and when they ignited them I told them that this was the fate awaiting their brethren in Palestine.'" After the war, Wagner organized the attempts to allow the Templers to return to Palestine.
Rafi Eitan, the son of Jewish pioneers from Russia, was seventeen at the time. "Here come exultant Germans, who had been members of the Nazi Party, who enlisted to the Wehrmacht and SS, and they want to return to their property when all the Jewish property outside was destroyed," he said.
Eitan was a member of a seventeen - man force from the Haganah's "special company" sent to liquidate Wagner, under a direct order from the Haganah high command. The Haganah chief of staff, Yitzhak Sadeh, realized that this was not a regular military operation and summoned the two men who had been selected to squeeze the trigger. To encourage them, he told them about a man he had shot with his pistol in Russia as revenge for a pogrom.
On March 22, 1946, after painstaking intelligence gathering , the hit squad lay in wait for Wagner in Tel Aviv . They forced him off the road onto a sandy lot at 123 Levinsky Street and shot him.
Haganah's underground radio station , Kol Yisrael (the Voice of Israel), announced the following day, "The well-known Nazi Gotthilf Wagner, head of the German community in Palestine , was executed yesterday by the Hebrew underground . Let it be known that no Nazi will place a foot on the soil of the Land of Israel."
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Wawrzyn, H. (2013). Nazis in the Holy Land 1933-1948. Germany: De Gruyter, p. 127:
In fact, Gotthilf Wagner had been a member of the Nazi party in Palestine. His membership no. 7024779 is recorded at the Public Record Office in London and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
(The Holocaust denial antisemitic 'Adelaide Institute of Australia' obviously "denied" he was a nazi).
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A clean shot:
'Sarona Mayor, Prominent Palestine Nazi and S.S. Leader, Shot to Death Near Tel Aviv.'
JTA, March 24, 1946.
original report
Gotthilf Wagner, former mayor of the German colony of Sarona, near Tel Aviv, and one of the leading Palestine Nazis, was today shot to death as he journeyed from Sarona to Wilhelma, another German community. Before the war he was a S.S. group leader.
The attack took place on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. One man alighted from a taxi and approached the car in which Wagner and a police escort were sitting, and opened fire. No one else in the car was hurt. The attacker immediately re-entered the taxi and fled. Although Wagner was carrying over $3,000, no money was taken.
Wagner, an owner of a large iron foundry in Jaffa, was interned by the Palestine Government during the war. He acted as liaison agent between the other detained Palestine Nazis and the Administration, and also served as trustee for their property. Throughout the war he paid taxes to the Tel Aviv municipality in order to maintain German claims to various plots of land in the city.
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* "The German Templers, most of whom were Nazis, received full monetary compensation for their property here, even though Israel was not required to do this."
* As Helmut Georg Laemmle, (active member of the Templer community, one of the heads of the community in Australia. His father, Fritz Laemmle, and his mother, from the Groll clan, belonged to two of the wealthiest families in that community) tried sue and (still) demand money: "It is not right to pull out half of an historical document and exploit the fact that the bureaucratic system today is not familiar with the historical materials in order to try to obtain wealth dishonestly. In the end the historical truth is what decides and not manipulations or attempts to distort history."
* "On their way from their colony of Sarona through the streets of Tel Aviv - most of whose inhabitants at that time had been victims of Hitler - they sang the Nazi anthem, the 'Horst Wessel Lied.'"
Nir Mann, "The End of the Sarona Saga," Haaretz, July 1, 2011
Last month marked the end of a seven-year High Court case, in which a descendant of Tel Aviv's former Templer community demanded compensation for a real-estate project erected on land once owned by his family...
Upon Hitler's rise to power, the messianic Templer community underwent a metamorphosis from serving God to the cult of the Reich. The British authorities related to them as a fifth column and the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine imposed a general boycott on them. When the war broke out, the British put the Templers under house arrest within their seven colonies, on grounds of their being citizens of an enemy country, and their property was put under the supervision of the custodian of enemy property. Two weeks before that move, a German ship had sailed from Haifa port with 232 Templer recruits to the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, and with them 88 members of their families. After three citizen-exchange deals the Templer population shrank to only 1,007. On July 31, 1941, as the Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel approached the gates of Egypt from Libya, the British deported 536 Templers to Australia, among them 188 from Sarona, who were considered the Nazi hard core.
Eliezer Shinnar, who eventually became head of the Israeli delegation on the matter of German reparations, testified: "On their way from their colony of Sarona through the streets of Tel Aviv - most of whose inhabitants at that time had been victims of Hitler - they sang the Nazi anthem, the 'Horst Wessel Lied.' By chance I happened to witness this, and saw and heard this macabre event with my own eyes and ears."
Among the deportees was the petitioner's mother, Julie Erni, daughter of Philipp Groll, who bequeathed to his widow and their four daughters an estate of 24.5 dunams, on part of which the Weizmann Center stands.
A shrunken community remained in four detention colonies: Waldheim (now Moshav Alonei Abba, near Tivon ), Wilhelmina (Moshav Bnei Atarot ), the German Colony in Jerusalem, and Sarona, today the Kirya defense compound in Tel Aviv. At that time, the overall population of Tel Aviv was about 170,000, and its area was 6,635 dunams; Jaffa had some 70,000 residents, and an area of 6,155 dunams. The total area of land owned by Templers from Sarona, which constituted its own municipality, exceeded 6,500 dunams. About 4,400 of those dunams had been included in the Tel Aviv master plan for building since the 1920s (the Geddes plan).
In March 1943, the Mandatory government published an order expropriating lands for public purposes, which enabled transfer of some of the property of Sarona to the expansion of Tel Aviv (the Kiryat Meir neighborhood ). At the time, mayor Yisrael Rokach was actively looking to purchase lands for the city's expansion, as it was hemmed in from all directions. Most of the Templers were interested in selling theirs, but refrained from doing so under firm pressure from the burgermeister (mayor ) of Sarona, Gotthilf Wagner. Beginning in 1944 the British government leased extensive areas of the expropriated Sarona lands to the Tel Aviv municipality . In that year as well, the demand first arose to settle Holocaust survivors in Sarona. In response, poet Natan Alterman deplored the intention to use what he saw as the Germans' defiled property.
In his poem "We Demand Housing in Sarona," which was published in his regular "Seventh Column" in the Hebrew daily Davar, Alterman wrote: "And I know / if the government were to serve refugees / homes in Sarona on a plate / it would be a natural need for the newspaper to arise / and say: / We cannot take."
After the Germans' defeat, Moshe Sharett, head of the diplomatic department at the Jewish Agency, demanded of the British high commissioner that he deport the remaining Germans from the country and transfer their lands for the settlement of Holocaust survivors and Jewish soldiers who had served with the British Army "as compensation Germany owes the Jewish people.
In January 1946, an Allied committee meeting in Paris decided that German property, including property outside Germany and property of private German citizens, would serve as reparations payments to the victorious countries...
In July 1950, the Knesset passed the German Property Law, whereby a special custodian for German assets in the country was appointed. Two years later Israeli and German delegations began hammering out a reparations agreement in Cologne. Despite Israeli objections, at the last minute the Germans demanded discussion of the question of the Templers' property as a condition for signing the agreement; it was agreed the Templers would be compensated with 54 million marks to end the demands. On September 10, 1952, the reparations agreement was signed, though negotiations on the question of compensation for the Templers went on for another decade between the two countries, with the mediation of a Danish lands assessor, Prof. Max Sorensen. That agreement was finally signed on June 1, 1962, in Geneva. In March 1969, the last reparations payment was made, and in 1981 the fund established for that purpose in Australia was closed.
On June 13, the High Court of Justice rejected Laemmle's petition and obligated him to pay NIS 40,000 in court costs to the Tel Aviv municipality. The tribunal that heard the case was headed by now-retired Justice Ayala Procaccia, who was joined by Justices Miriam Naor and Dvora Berliner. The bench ruled there are no circumstances justifying the revocation of the expropriation and the return of the lands to the petitioner, since the Weizmann Center continues to serve the purpose of the expropriation. Moreover, ruled the justices, in light of the laws on trading with an enemy country and international agreements Israel signed with Germany - there is no scope for granting the petition.
"What is at the basis of the petition is money, money and money," says Katz. "Until now it isn't clear to me when the initiative of the petition arose. Did the petitioner himself initiate it, or was it his attorneys who expected to find an oil field that would open the way to claims on all of Sarona and the other colonies?"
"The initiative was the petitioner's," says attorney Moshe Kammar, who represented Laemmle together with attorney Talia Sasson, who formerly held a senior position in the State Prosecutor's Office and became known for the report she wrote on unauthorized outposts in the territories. "The ruling speaks for itself," Kammer adds, "and I have nothing to add."
Helmut Georg Laemmle, 76, is an active member of the Templer community, according to Mark Herrmann, one of the heads of the community in Australia. His father, Fritz Laemmle, and his mother, from the Groll clan, belonged to two of the wealthiest families in that community....
"The ruling underlines an important message to all kinds of claimants who are blinded by money and the message is that it is impossible to juggle history to your own advantage," says Prof. Katz. "It is not right to pull out half of an historical document and exploit the fact that the bureaucratic system today is not familiar with the historical materials in order to try to obtain wealth dishonestly. In the end the historical truth is what decides and not manipulations or attempts to distort history."
What do you mean?
Katz: "The claim disregarded the fact that the whole matter of the Templer real estate was settled in the reparations agreement. The High Court of Justice [in its ruling] adopted my opinion that the matter was closed in the 1960s with the signing of the reparations agreement between the government of Israel and the governments of West Germany and Australia. The German Templers, most of whom were Nazis, received full monetary compensation for their property here, even though Israel was not required to do this."
And what is your opinion of the legal measures taken by the Tel Aviv municipality in this matter?
"The municipality, represented by attorneys Gabriella Priel and Orna Aherak-Preluk, was 100 percent. The municipality took my advice not to compromise by any means."
Why?
"Because the historical truth was clear to me, and any compromise would have led to the creation of a precedent for other Templer land claims."
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