Seventieth Anniversary of the End of World War II

On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, Israel and Germany have commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of their relations. Despite the difficult history of Nazi Germany in the genocide of millions of Jews in Europe, the country has maintained very close relations and extensive cooperation with Israel over the past fifty years. Among these initiatives is the joint German-Israeli plan to apprehend the last Nazis. Israel, which gained independence three years after the end of World War II, established full diplomatic relations with West Germany at the ambassadorial level in 1965. This relationship was founded twenty years after the end of World War II and fourteen years after West Germany took responsibility for the genocide of Jews under the Nazi regime. West Germany committed to paying substantial reparations to Jewish survivors and also provided extensive financial and military support to Israel. East Germany never established relations with Israel until its collapse in 1989, but the support of a unified Germany for Israel grew after the integration of East and West Germany in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Jerusalem Post on May 8, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, referred to the extensive history of Israeli-German relations and milestones in these relations: - In 1965, during the chancellorship of Ludwig Erhard in West Germany and the premiership of Levi Eshkol in Israel, they exchanged ambassadors; at that time, Iraq, which saw itself at the forefront of the opposition to Israel, was so displeased with West Germany's decision that it severed relations with the Bonn government. - However, five years later, Abba Eban, the then Israeli Foreign Minister, became the first senior official of the Jewish state to officially visit Nazi Germany after the Holocaust, and during this trip, he also visited the Dachau camp, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed as part of the Nazi regime's 'Final Solution.' - During Abba Eban's visit to Germany, it was reported that an Arab conspiracy to assassinate the Israeli foreign minister had been uncovered, which the Germans had prevented from being executed. - However, in 1972, just seven years after the establishment of full relations between Israel and West Germany, during the Olympics in Munich that year, Israeli athletes were taken hostage by Palestinian militants, and during the attempt to free them, eleven athletes were killed. - But the killing of Israeli athletes did not sever relations with Germany; it was only a year later that Chancellor Willy Brandt visited Israel. - During Willy Brandt's visit to Israel, while Israel was engaged in the Yom Kippur War with Arab countries that same year, Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, asked Mr. Brandt to convey Israel's 'message' to Anwar Sadat, the then leader of Egypt, that Israel was ready to return a large part of the Sinai Peninsula, which it had captured in the Six-Day War six years earlier, in exchange for peace. - Yitzhak Rabin, when he first became Prime Minister in 1975, became the highest-ranking Israeli official to visit West Germany; he, like Abba Eban, visited the labor camps established by Nazi Germany and visited Bergen-Belsen, where 37,000 people were killed. - During this visit to Germany, Rabin explicitly told the then Chancellor of Germany not to interfere in the Middle East conflict because of your country's past. - In 1983, when Israeli basketball star Ralph Klein, a Holocaust camp survivor born in Berlin and a star of the Maccabi Tel Aviv team, was appointed as the coach of the German national basketball team, it was news that sounded like a bombshell. - During the historical events of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led to the unification of East and West Germany, Yitzhak Shamir, the then Prime Minister of Israel, told Chancellor Helmut Kohl that this development could pose a threat to Jews; a view that Mr. Kohl immediately rejected. - Three years after the unification of East and West Germany, Yitzhak Rabin, who had become Prime Minister for the second time, visited unified Germany and called on the European Union to lift the boycott against Israel, saying: 'If 60 years after the rise of the Nazis, Europe has still not learned the lesson to confront problems at their inception, what is the meaning of the European Union?' - In 1998, three years after Rabin's assassination and five years after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, the German army sent its officers to Israel for the first time as part of annual visits to also visit the Holocaust Museum established in memory of the victims of the genocide of Jews in Europe. - However, in 2002, when Jews from the former Soviet Union found more opportunities to leave the republics of the Soviet Union, 19,000 of them preferred permanent life in Germany over life in Israel; that year, 18,000 Jews from Russia and other republics immigrated to Israel. - Joschka Fischer, the then German Foreign Minister, stated in a speech in spring 2005 at the United Nations during the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in the final days of World War II that in Germany's foreign policy, 'the right to exist of Israel is non-negotiable and a fundamental right.' - In 2009, when a 575-page report known as the 'Goldstone Report,' accusing both Israel and Palestinian militants of committing 'war crimes,' was presented as a draft resolution for voting in the UN Security Council, Germany voted against it to implicitly support Israel. - However, two years later, in 2011, when illegal Israeli settlements expanded in the West Bank, Angela Merkel, the current Chancellor of Germany, explicitly threatened that the delivery of advanced German nuclear submarines to the Israeli army might be suspended in protest against Israeli construction. - Germany later retracted this threat, and in subsequent years, the delivery of advanced German submarines to the Israeli Navy continued; these submarines have often been said to provide significant assistance to Israel in the event of a conflict between Israel and Germany. - However, in 2011, in another milestone, when the Jewish state’s symphony orchestra visited Germany, it played works by Richard Wagner for the first time; this is while many Jews have refused to listen to Wagner's works because his music would send Hitler into ecstasy. - In 2014, the last year of Shimon Peres's presidency, he awarded his friend, Mrs. Merkel, the 'Israel Medal,' which is the highest honor of the Jewish state.