Sarona (colony) - Third Reich and WW2

Third Reich and WW2

After the Nazis came to power in Germany, the new Reich's government shaped foreign policy according to Nazi ideals, especially using financial pressure. The Nazi emphasis was on equating Germany and Germans with Nazism, discriminating against all non-Nazi aspects of German culture and identity. All international schools of German language subsidised or fully financed by government funds were obliged to redraw their educational programmes and to solely employ teachers aligned with the Nazi party. German teachers in Bethlehem of Galilee were financed by the Reich's government, allowing Nazi teachers to take over there. In 1933 Templer functionaries and other Gentile Germans living in Palestine appealed to Paul von Hindenburg and the Foreign Office not to use swastika symbols for German institutions, without success. Some German Gentiles from Palestine pleaded with the Reich's government to drop its plan to boycott shops of Jewish Germans on April 1, 1933. Some Templers enlisted in the German army. By 1938, 17% of the Templers in Palestine were members of the Nazi party. According to historian Yossi Ben-Artzi, "The members of the younger generation to some extent broke away from naive religious belief, and were more receptive to the Nazi German nationalism. The older ones tried to fight it." At the start of World War II colonists with German citizenship were rounded up by the British authorities and sent, together with Italian and Hungarian enemy nationals, to internment camps in Waldheim and Bethlehem of Galilee, and were eventually deported. In 1962 the State of Israel paid 54 million Deutsche Marks in compensation to property owners whose assets were nationalized.

Sarona, together with the three other agricultural settlements - Wilhelma, Bethlehem of Galilee and Waldheim - became "perimeter" compounds into which all Germans living in Palestine were interned. Sarona held close to 1,000 persons behind a guarded, 4m high barbed-wire fence. In July 1941, 198 people from Sarona, together with almost 400 from the other internment camps, were deported to Australia on the Queen Elizabeth. They were interned in Tatura in Central Victoria Australia until 1947. By November 1944, most of the remaining Sarona residents had been moved to the camp in Wilhelma. The last group was sent there in September 1945.

The former Sarona houses were taken over by the British army and mandatory government, and as such were the target of raids and attacks by the Zionist underground organizations during their 1945–1947 struggle against British rule.