The German Officer who Immigrated to Palestine

Haaretz brings the story (here is the Hebrew version) of Otto Husmeier, an Imperial German Officer who has fallen in love with the Jewish sister of one of his comrades, and later immigrated with her to Palestine:

"Otto Husmeier was born in 1897 in the city of Halle in Prussia. In World War I, he enlisted in the Imperial Army and was sent to the French front. He completed an officers' course and was later wounded at the Ardennes front. The injury left him slightly crippled, with limited movement in his arm and hand, for the rest of his life. For his valor on the battlefield, he was awarded the Iron Cross, and at the end of the war he continued his military service in the Weimar Republic. He met Edith, the woman he would marry, when he came to pay a condolence call at her parents' home in Berlin. Her brother, Officer Walter Bubriker, who had been killed in the war, was his best friend.

The Bubrikers were a Jewish family that immigrated to Berlin from the town of Bobrik in Galicia, and became ensconced among the new elite that was evolving in Germany at the time. Husmeier and Edith married in 1928 and lived in Berlin.

"Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was humiliating to my father's sense of pride as a Prussian officer," Oz explains. "He told my mother: 'I'm not staying here with this stinking corporal!' My mother worked in the Blau-Weiss (Blue-White) Zionist youth movement and suggested that they immigrate to Palestine. And my father, who knew nothing at all about the place, agreed. A month later, in February 1933, my parents arrived in Palestine and settled in Petah Tikva. Not long after that, my father was called upon to run the large orchard in Gan Haim near Ra'anana, which covered about 1,000 dunams [250 acres]. The orchard belonged to the Anglo-Swiss Plantation company and my mother's uncle was one of the three partners in the company."

Husmeier later helped Hagganah in their actions, but was ironically interred by the British, with his Jewish son (who was four year old at the time), because of his German nationality.

His son tells On the eve of World War II, reality came knocking on the family's door once again, Oz continues: "Elsa Renfeld, my mother's sister, also married a German gentile. They were both doctors in a prestigious clinic in Berlin, and in 1939 they came for a visit. My father begged them to remain in Palestine, but they refused. 'We (Jews) are the intellectuals of Europe,' Aunt Elsa argued, 'and no harm will come to us.' My father, who'd lived and breathed the army his whole life, said to her, 'Yes, you come from academia, but I come from the army. You can't tell me what's going to happen there. If they come for you,' he said, and then immediately corrected himself, 'when they come for you, no academic degree is going to be of any help.'

"Before they sailed from Jaffa, my father told them that if arrested they should say they were the in-laws of Major Otto Husmeier and ask to contact Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris was Father's good friend from the officers' course. When the Gestapo agents raided their home, they did ask to call Canaris. With his intervention, they were put on a military night train and sent to Switzerland. In a postcard to my mother, Elsa wrote: 'We did what you told us and tonight we arrived in Geneva by train.'"

Canaris, who was head of military intelligence and worked secretly against Hitler, was ousted in February 1944 and executed a month before the war's end. "When my father found out about it, he wept bitterly," Oz remembers. "I was a child then and it was the first and only time in my life that I saw him cry."