Much focus is placed on American and Soviet support of Israel — superpower positioning decisive for the state’s early survival. Yet, the major backers of Israel until 1967 were the leaders of the Federal Republic of Germany, including successors of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The new West German state was Israel’s biggest financial supporter, aided its transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, and gave it crucial military shipments and advice.
With the foundation of a West German state in 1949, with its capital in Bonn, the government led by Konrad Adenauer of the conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Union) sought to join the emerging Western bloc. Remilitarization was crucial in this regard, breaking with the previous unanimous position among US, French, Soviet, and British leaders that Germany should be kept pacified in a manner like Japan.
With increasing Cold War confrontations, chiefly the Korean War in 1950, West Germany and the Western bloc came to agree to German remilitarization within a Western military alliance. Through this commitment, the United States and other NATO powers abandoned their support for a meaningful denazification of Germany and instead accepted the reintegration of many unreconstructed Nazis.
Supreme Allied commander of Europe in 1951, Dwight D. Eisenhower, reckoned that he had been wrong to conflate the Wehrmacht with the Nazis, stating that the “German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland.” His successor ordered in 1953 that all German officers charged with war crimes in Eastern Europe should be pardoned, the better to create an anti-Soviet bulwark.
Israel also wanted to become part of the Western bloc. Yet its leadership was still engaged in an oppositional stance…
Auteur: Felix Helberg
