When the reparations agreement was signed, Israel was in a state of crisis, with rationing of basic goods and a lack of most normal amenities. Immigration was halted by early 1952 due to the growing economic crisis, as Israel was at the time still reliant on foreign capital inflow to maintain its economy. It remained dominated by agriculture and artisan production, with only 19 percent of all investments between 1950 and 1954 being in the manufacturing sector.

Trying to accommodate the waves of Jewish immigrants, Israel borrowed at a threatening rate, unable as it was to offset increasing imports for its growing population due to the lack of well-developed export industries. By 1952, Israel’s strategy of financing its army and ever-growing refugee population through deficit spending had reached its limits, as its weak economic output made it likely unable to service its ballooning debt soon.

The reparations agreement between Israel and Germany, signed in 1952, would prove crucial in preventing an Israeli crisis, as it provided the resources for the transformation of Israel into an industrialized society. The reparations were not paid in cash but instead largely in funding capital-intensive industries, raw materials for factories, and the creation of a merchant ship-building industry.

Between 80 and 100 percent of steel and iron for Israel’s growing machine industry came from German resource payments to Israel, without which Israel would have been unable to develop its industrial base. This helped GDP growth rise from 1.8 percent before the agreement to 17 percent from 1954 to 1955. German aid to Israel outmatched American aid by a factor of three. West German companies, in some cases previously involved in the Holocaust, could profit handsomely from the reparations as they created a German export market, while many German companies also became subcontractors for Israeli firms.

By 1954, some 20 percent of Israel’s imports were from West Germany, making it Israel’s second-biggest import partner. As Müller pointed out in his aforementioned Bundestag speech, “The winners of this agreement are not only the industrial giants in Israel and the Americans, but also the industrial giants in West Germany, for whom it will secure markets and huge profits for several years to come.”

West German assistance to Israel wasn’t just about economic aid; Bonn would also play a crucial role in the professionalization of Israel’s armed forces. Israel was able to buy weaponry and equipment from West Germany, which included machine guns, transportation equipment, heavy weapons, helicopters, submarines, and even tanks of the variety “M48 Patton.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gained access to a higher-quality arsenal. German officers were also sent to Israel to train the IDF, while Israeli officers were sent to Germany to be trained by the Bundeswehr, including future IDF chiefs such as Haim Laskov. West Germany would also aid Israel in assisting the creation of its intelligence agency, Mossad, alongside coordinating their activities in Africa and Asia. West Germany was even involved in aiding Israel’s early attempts at becoming a nuclear power. Bonn had become Israel’s most active supporter and backer by the 1960s, even ahead of the bigger powers. 

Armed with German weapons and money, Israeli tanks were able to roll into Sinai, Golan Heights, and the West Bank following Israel’s victory in the 1967 war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria — with the Germans seeing themselves winning the battles Adolf Hitler lost. It would be the moment an elite consensus around supporting Israel was firmly established. It expressed itself in the form of “philosemitism,” an excessive identification with Israel and its military victories.

Israel was seen as inspiring militarist power, which Germany should emulate. Over a thousand West Germans asked the Israeli embassy if they could become Israeli soldiers, including the writer Günter Grass, previously of the Waffen-SS. The speaker of the “Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members” (HIAG), Karl Cerff, discovered his comrades in Israel. He found the Israelis “amazing” and stated positively how “the Kibbutz are similar to the [Reich] labor service.” One SS veteran donated 1,500 Marks to the Israeli embassy to prove that “not all SS members were criminals.”

The media joined in the chorus too, with the Israeli foreign minister thanking the German “press, radio and television to have in each phase of the conflict . . . sided with us.” Der Spiegel talked of “Israel’s Blitzkrieg,” enthusiastically describing Israel soldiers as “winning like Rommel.” The Rheinische Post discovered in Moshe Dayan “the student” of Erwin Rommel, as in their view Israeli victories strengthened German self-consciousness. Berliner Zeitung talked of Israel’s “total victory.”

The right-wing media was even more enthusiastic: for Die Welt, Israel’s offensive was a “cleansing thunder,” whose success should inspire West Germany to resort to military confrontations in East Germany too. It “disproved the fashionable thesis that war may not be a ‘means of politics’ anymore. No one may learn more from Israel’s behavior than Germany.” Bild surpassed all others, discovering the Federal Republic’s own “Arabs” who must be conquered: East Germans, Poles, and Czechs. Der Spiegel would print a reader’s letter from South Africa from no other than “Congo Müller,” a Wehrmacht veteran who would become an infamous mercenary and responsible for multiple war crimes in the central African country. He praised Israel’s existence and described the threat of Israeli encirclement by the Soviet-backed Arab states to be the “number-one world threat” for the “free world.”

This identification was not without criticism. In the wake of 1968, much of the German left objected to the persistence of Nazi elites and saw elites’ newfound appreciation of Israel in a critical light. Ulrike Meinhof would describe this identification of Germans with Israel as a case of German nationalists “winning in Sinai finally, after twenty-five years, the battle of Stalingrad”; seeing the Arab defeat as a promising sign that could be repeated against the Soviet Union.

Israel’s success was viewed as a cause for hope of overturning the international order, enforcing imperialist interests through sheer force. This would prove crucial, as the consensus around philosemitism was from the beginning a means of ideologically justifying a revisionist Germany — while being able to harness the growing criticism of the post-Nazi status quo for its own purposes. Instead of challenging the capitalist elites that fed Nazism’s initial rise and continue to dominate German politics to this day, remembrance was redirected toward justifying continued support of Israel. Further, it became the pretext for casting any actions a rising Germany might take abroad as driven by a duty to “fight fascism.”

The 1980s saw a rising critical consciousness of the failure of denazification, as activists founded civil associations seeking to spread awareness of Nazi crimes and challenge the powers that be. Yet even this would be subsumed by the German state, in providing a moral dimension to its philosemitism. The emerging remembrance of the Holocaust came to be used as a means of justifying German military involvement abroad, as the Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer invoked “Auschwitz never again” to justify Germany’s break with international law as Berlin participated in NATO bombings of Serbian forces. “Antideutsche” has become an infamous example of this, with the justified focus on German complicity in the Shoah instead used to defend Germany’s military involvements abroad as well as supporting any and all actions of the Israeli government in the name of fighting antisemitism.

We should, then, avoid seeing in Germany’s anti-antisemitism a “failure” in achieving “its purported aim,” which inadvertently ended up defending Israeli nationalism. From the outset, the Federal Republic’s philosemitism was grounded in Germany’s return as a self-assured imperialist power, seeing Israel as a shining example to be replicated. Following the 1980s, this was supplemented with a moral justification of such actions as being a “remembrance” of the Shoah, which at the same time served to avoid any dangerous consequences that an active memory of it would bring.

The war in Gaza since October 7, 2023, has shown the full impact of this approach. As Israel has been destroying hospitals, public infrastructure, and universities and engineered a famine by blockading any meaningful access to Gaza by international organizations, Germany has been in the forefront in supporting it. German defense exports to Israel have doubled since the beginning of the war, the government participated in Israel’s attempt at dissolving the United Nations Relief and Works Agency by defunding it temporarily, as well as joining in the Israeli government’s rejection of international law.

Erstwhile German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, a Green, even defended Israel’s attacks on hospitals and schools. When the WELT chief editor wrote that “Netanyahu is the avantgarde of the West,” he correctly identified Israel’s war in Gaza as the beginning of the demolition of the status quo the West created. As the West now sees its international institutions levied against it by other powers, the Gazan genocide can serve as a point of inspiration to dispense with humanitarianism entirely. Germany now seems poised to resist implementing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court — the same court Germany was instrumental in creating to enforce its “rules-based order.”

It should be no surprise that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been the most forceful supporter of Israel, finding common cause in dispensing with the previous model of hegemony in favor of great-power domination. Like the Israelis of Sderot, who watched and cheered as bombs were dropped on Gaza, the far right is watching with excitement as Israel is internationally legitimizing ethnic cleansing and the doctrine of might is right.

Germany’s aggressive imperialism has turned inward, as protests demanding the cessation of military exports to Israel, as well as a real commitment to support Palestinian statehood, are suppressed through restrictions on the freedom of speech, while immigrants are placed under general surveillance. New immigrants are increasingly required to pledge allegiance to Israel’s right to existence, while following October 7, the German police banned nearly all protests in support of the Palestinian people fearing potential “antisemitic incidents.”

As Germany’s support for Israel’s genocidal war is unpopular with much of the population, the media and politicians had no choice but to respond by delegitimizing the protests as a sign of a growing “Islamism” that must be fought. The AfD has used this moment to popularize its call for the cleansing of Germany of much of its immigrant population, seeking to emulate Israel’s ethnostate that it has for a long time admired. This has been hugely successful, as open political and media racism has allowed the AfD to take advantage and spread its message of immigrants as an internal threat, helping it to second place in the February 23 federal election.

Fittingly, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz (CDU), who earlier this year presided over the first parliamentary cooperation between his party and the far-right AfD, even publicly invited Benjamin Netanyahu to attend his inauguration, in spite of the international arrest warrant against him. It seems that Germany’s fervor for Israel has today reached its logical conclusion.