Although ruins of a 3,400-year-old Bronze Age citadel have been found in Nahariya, next to the sea near the estuary of the river Ga’aton, and a church from the Byzantine period, dedicated to St Lazarus, but destroyed by fire, probably at the time of the Persian invasion in 614, was excavated in the 1970s, there was no major settlement here until 1934, during the British Mandate, when work began to found Nahariya as an agricultural village by a company headed by the agronomist, Dr Selig Eugen Soskin, the civil engineer, Yoseph Loewy, the financial expert, Heinrich Cohn, and the engineer, Simon Reich, on land purchased from the Arab Toueini family, a prominent Christian Greek Orthodox Lebanese family residing in Beirut. Plots were offered to new German Jewish immigrants who had escaped from Nazi persecution, and the first two German immigrant couples permanently settled in Nahariya on 10 February 1935, the official founding date of Nahariya.
Yoseph Loewy (left) and Dr Selig Soskin (right) [Credits: Deror Avi, Public Domain]
While the first settlers lived in huts, the settlement was rapidly developed as houses were built and trees and gardens planted. The residents took to raising chickens in what was envisaged initially as an agricultural settlement. But economic and climate difficulties meant that the residents quickly realized that agriculture was impractical, and the town moved in two directions: tourism and the food industry. The former saw Nahariya gradually turned into a European-style resort town with its natural surroundings and beaches, and guest accommodation developed. The latter was aided through the home dairy of the German Strauss family, which quickly developed commercially into a family-owned industry which continues nationally to this day, and the Soglowek family, which settled in Nahariya in 1937, opened a prominent butcher shop, and developed the "Nahariya sausage" (the factory moved to Shlomi in 2000).
By 1948 the town had 1,700 inhabitants. In the 1950s, the absorption of a nearby immigrant camp rendered Nahariya a development town, home to Jewish refugees from North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The population grew to 9,800 by 1955, increasing to 23,800 by 1972. As of 2022, there are 62,284 residents.
One of the pleasures of the town today is its small botanical and zoological park, at the northern edge of the town, in the Neve Alon neighbourhood. It is open for free and has a delightful coffee shop with outdoor seating, and Yonatan, Riva and I visited at the end of December 2022, just as I had with Amber in April. What is not recorded anywhere in Nahariya, nor in any book, but only in a couple of articles—as you will learn—is that this delightful oasis began as a park created by a mysterious German Christian stranger in the 1960s, when there were only some pioneer shacks and open land in the area. The original park was divided into 12 sections, one for each of the tribes of Israel, arrayed around an odd structure known as the Tabernacle. The German, having created the park with his own hands and money, then disappeared.
In the early 1960s, Nahariya was still a place full of people from Europe and elsewhere with terrible stories that were largely buried and kept from their children. This is when the mysterious German, Erich Gunther Deutecom (sometimes spelled Deutekom or Deut-Akom), appeared in Nahariya. His mysterious life has been plumbed by the Canadian-Israeli journalist and author, Matti Friedman, and I am indebted almost entirely for the story told here to Matti’s deep and original research, which he published in a broader and personal context in June 2022.
As well as the variations in the spelling of his surname, Deutecom was sometimes referred to as Erich Gunther, and on other occasions as Gideon Gunther. There’s the possibility that none of these names were really his at all. Only one photograph of Deutecom seems to exist, in an article in Hebrew, The Eccentric of Ba’al Hatzor, by the journalist Yehuda Litani, who covered the West Bank for Haaretz in the ‘70s and ‘80s and took a personal interest in the strange case of Deutecom who—as we shall see—ended up at the hill of Ba’al Hatzor outside Jerusalem. You can see this photograph and the few others unearthed by Friedman in his article.
According to police documents obtained by Litani, the German was born around 1918, possibly in Munich where he seems to have had family and some property that generated money. But a neighbour who lived next door and grew up speaking German told Matti Friedman that his accent wasn’t a Munich one. Another described him as a man of culture, an architect who spoke polished hochdeutsch (High German). Many described him as conspicuously Aryan in appearance, whilst others described him as a yekke which, though strictly a Jew of German-speaking origin, was intended to convey that he was somewhat stiff and formal and over-dressed, as were the German-Jewish immigrants of the 1930s.
In any event he would have been about 21 when the Second World War began. According to Litani, he fought in North Africa with Rommel’s Afrika Korps, but there is no evidence to back this claim and—as Friedman points out—it would be a good story to tell a town full of European Jewish survivors, because it would free him from their doubts that he might have been their persecutor. Friedman had a Berlin journalist, Daniel Mosseri, check the archives housing Wehrmacht records, and the archive that keeps the lists of Nazi party officials and members of elite arms of the Third Reich, like the SS and SD, but he found no soldier or officer with Deutecom’s name. If he served in any of those organizations, his file was either lost or he used a different name. And although Litani’s claims were apparently backed by his possession of Deutecom’s own documents, by 2022, when Friedman was researching Deutecom, Litani had died and there was no sign of them.
Whatever the truth of his Nazi wartime service which, by his age, is almost certain in some form or another, whatever happened to him is clearly at the centre of his strange life in Israel. As we will see, he had some sort of confused and eccentric ‘mission to the Jews’ which he felt impelled to carry out, and it is likely that this was not so much as a result of a general sense of responsibility felt by many Germans at that time, who volunteered on kibbutzim and the like, but perhaps, as Friedman imagines, by the memory of something he’d done with his own hands.
There were other German Christians in the Western Galilee. Friedrich Nothacker, a preacher, and his wife Luise, were influenced by an Orthodox Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity, after having lost more than seventy relatives in the Shoa. Helene Wyman suggested that since “love can heal wounds or at least relieve pain,” Nothacker should travel to Israel with her to find Holocaust survivors to comfort. He had already built a humble hostel in the Black Forest region for people to come “and receive strength and guidance from G-d.” Thus the Nothackers were well-prepared when, in 1959, after Wyman’s death, they acquired an abandoned guesthouse in Nahariya for the purpose. A decade later, in 1969 they established Zedekah Beth El, a hotel in Shavei Zion, on the coast south of Nahariya, that to this day offers free stays to Holocaust survivors and their families.
A little further south and inland is the kibbutz of Nes Amim (literally ‘Banner of the Nations’, Isaiah 11:10), founded by European Christians as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish People after the Shoa, whose theology emphasises the need for dialogue with Jews and other religions. Originally most of the residents were German and Dutch, but by 2019, 90% of the residents were Jews and, of the 10% who weren’t, 6% were Arabs.
The townsfolk understood that Deutecom was a man of deep religious faith who had come to make amends—but whether it was for the crimes of the German people in general or for his own in particular wasn’t clear, since nobody really knew who he was. People in the neighbourhood still remember Deutecom. In general, people who escaped to Israel before the shoah were open to him, while those who experienced it were not. His strangeness did not come from his speaking German: almost everyone in the town knew German, even if they’d sworn never to speak it again. Although later written of as eccentric, this is not how most people remember him in Nahariya, but as a sane man with unusual ideas. He designed his house at number 6, Ge’ula (Redemption) Street, next to the park, and produced detailed plans for extraordinary buildings he wished to construct.
Everyone knew he was Christian but, as I have said, he asked to be called by a Hebrew name, Gideon. He had a wife back in Germany, and a daughter with Down syndrome, who came to live with him, but after a while they went back to Germany. Although it was a time when people smoked everywhere, he strictly forbade it in his park where, on Fridays in the Tabernacle, he would screen cartoons with a biblical theme for the children. His anti-smoking beliefs formed a theme: When he came to sell his house in Nahariya, he cancelled a deal with a buyer after he learned that he was a smoker!
Friedman quotes Dr Shaul Shasha, who bought Deutecom’s house after that cancelled sale with the smoker. Dr Sasha got to know Deutecom to the extent that he was considered an authority on him. According to him, Deutecom’s story was “that he’d had a dream where an angel told him to come to the Land of Israel and build the temple. But you don’t build the temple right away. You have to make a long journey.” In this light it is clear that, for Deutecom, Nahariya merely a way-station to Jerusalem. After Israel captured the Old City and the Temple Mount in the Six Day War in 1967, Deutecom moved into the next stage of his plan, perhaps seeing divine approval.
When we visited the park, I decided to try and find Deutecom’s old house. There are houses only on the south side of the street (the park wall is on the north side), and they are numbered consecutively. It was easy enough to find number 6—assuming the numbering didn’t change—but there was nothing much to see. Just an old house in lush overgrown gardens. Whilst I was looking, an elderly worker hooted me from his van and asked if he could help me. I went over and told him what I was looking for. Eitan Langliv told me it was his house I was looking at—Friedman had written that Dr Sasha had died a few weeks after he interviewed him—but Eitan denied that Deutecom had lived there. However when I did some further research at home, I realised that we had been at cross-purposes: Eitan had thought I was looking at number 5 where he lives, whereas Deutecom lived at number 6. Eitan was surprised I knew a little about the story, which is hardly known beyond those who personally remember him, but was both interested and generous in telling me what he knew, although in retrospect it seems odd that, in denying that Deutecom had lived in his house, he didn’t mention that he had lived next door. But since I didn’t mention which house I had read that Deutecom had lived in, perhaps he just sought to protect his home and the home of his neighbours from prying eyes.
Eitan told me that he remembered Deutecom from when he was a child, fifty to sixty years ago. He was a strange man who had built an octagonal building—clearly his Tabernacle—and a playground for the children in what was then empty land. He said that on Yom Kippur, when all the neighbours would dome out from the Synagogue, they would see Deutecom sitting on his verandah eating conspicuously, but he was harmless, and everybody knew he was not a Jew. But not everyone accepted him, and he felt this may have disappointed him. In any event Eitan had heard that, after he left Nahariya, he had been killed by Arabs in Jerusalem. And thus we segue into the next part of the mysterious story.
In the early 1970s Deutecom abandoned his park and Tabernacle. He moved from the coast inland to the community settlement of Segev, now known as Atzmon, which is a few kilometres from where we live in Misgav, the region of which a part was formerly known as Gush Segev. He planted a cactus garden and invited local children to help out. He was treated respectfully by his neighbours, but didn’t stay for long.
Among Deutecom’s papers are skilled architectural sketches of a grand structure he called the Friedens Tempel, or Peace Temple, which he meant to build in Jerusalem. The temple would bring together Jews, Christians, and Muslims, echoing the biblical description of “a house of prayer for all nations.” He approached legendary mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, and wasn’t deterred when he got no response. If he couldn’t build in Jerusalem, he would find another suitable location in the vicinity. So he travelled north to a hill, Jebel Assour, next to the Arab town of Silwad, north-east of Ramallah. Jebel Assour is known in Hebrew as Ba’al Hatzor, named for a Canaanite deity. In the second book of Samuel it is mentioned as the place where Avshalom, King David’s son, invites Amnon, his brother, to drink with him as their shepherds shear the goats. Avshalom gets his brother drunk and then avenges Amnon’s rape of his half-sister Tamar by killing him and leaving his body on the hill. So it was here at this godforsaken spot that Deutecom bought a plot of land from a Silwad family, hired a few workers, and began hauling building materials up the hill on donkeys. He built a shack and moved in, sometimes joined by a girlfriend from Jerusalem, but mostly alone with his dreams.
Soon Arabs burned down his shack, and a second time when he asked for protection from the army, which was not forthcoming, but he kept building. The villagers said he fired flares from the hill at night. The lack of response from the army is part of the reason for the journalist, Litani’s subsequent interest in Deutecom: Litani had been a press officer in the IDF’s local headquarters when Deutecom was on the hill, whose fiancée colleague had fielded his appeals for protection. Litani felt they had failed him, writing that “Since then I’ve been going around with a sense of guilt about this man, whom I never met.”
On 16 February 1973, two teenage Arabs from Silwad, Ahmed al-Zeer and Abdullah Fardan, decided to kill Deutecom. Later they confessed to the police that they believed they had to prevent Jews and foreigners from buying land and building houses near them. They armed themselves with a hoe and an iron pipe and climbed toward the Deutecom’s shack at sunset. According to al-Zeer, Deutecom received them warmly. He claimed that when they offered Deutecom a cigarette he wouldn’t take it, explaining that he didn’t smoke, one of the German’s habits that seemed so memorable at the time, when almost everyone smoked. The two Arab youths struck Deutecom whilst he admired the sunset, and finished him off when he started screaming. Because they harboured the primitive superstition that Deutecom’s eyes might contain the last image he saw, enabling the police somehow to identify his killers, they gouged them out. The murder was briefly reported in the Jerusalem Post, but it seems that nothing was reported in Germany. Deutecom’s shack fell into disrepair and vanished, and his park in Nahariya surrendered to weeds and the Tabernacle fell down or was demolished, to be replaced by a new botanical and zoological garden was built on the spot in 2003. A selection of pictures can be seen below.
To finish off the strange tale of Erich Gunther Deutecom, I can do not better than quote verbatim from Friedman’s article; incredibly, Friedman located Ahmed al-Zeer, the 19-year-old murderer who is now 68, in Silwad.
“He recalled hearing his neighbors talk about a stranger who’d bought land from a villager who shouldn’t have sold it. Maybe this man was building a hotel, they didn’t know. Everyone called him “the German,” but he had a Jewish name, Gideon, and the villagers were certain he was a settler. There were rumors, al-Zeer said, that this man was connected to the Shin Bet or the CIA. It was said that he kept a pistol. Everyone saw the flares he fired at night. Al-Zeer seemed curious about the victim, whom he called Gideon Gunther. He didn’t know much about him.
“The men of Silwad tried to warn the neighbors who’d sold their land, but they refused to cancel the deal. “Land is a man’s personal honor, and when they didn’t retract, he had to die to protect our land and our honor,” al-Zeer said. The German’s death sentence came from military commanders in Fatah: “The decision was from the leadership, who said this man has no honor and if you can kill him, do it.” So he did it.
“Afterward he escaped to the Gulf and tried to build a new life in Kuwait. When that didn’t work out he joined the PLO fedayeen training in camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. In the summer of 1976, three years after the killing, he and two other fighters were trying to cross back from Jordan with a shipment of rifles and hand grenades when they ran into an Israeli ambush. His two comrades were killed but he was only wounded, and his life was saved by doctors at Hadassah Hospital. That’s where the police took his confession, which he says he gave only after the interrogators showed him the signed confession of his accomplice, Fardan.
“[…] An Israeli court sentenced al-Zeer to life. But nine years later, when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command traded three captive Israeli soldiers for more than a thousand prisoners, his name was on the list and he walked. He ended up in Libya, drifted to Jordan, married, and eventually had eight children. He came back to his town after Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, and got a job with the Palestinian Authority, first as a lawyer and then as a military judge.
“Twenty years after his return, in 2013, he was in his town’s agricultural lands at the foot of the hill when a group of young Israeli men approached from a nearby settlement outpost. At least one of the assailants had an iron bar, and they beat him within an inch of his life. There’s no indication they knew who he was. An Israeli human rights group published a photograph of al-Zeer in the hospital, his head bandaged and both eyes swollen shut. That report brought him back to the attention of the few people who take an interest in this case, and eventually led me to him.
“He hasn’t recovered from the assault. He can barely walk, and moves around his house with the help of his wife. All of this happened a short walk downhill from where he’d once offered the German a cigarette, and suggested he turn around for a moment to see the sunset. There’s no peace temple at Ba’al Hatzor. This country might draw dreamers, but it has other plans. The hill remains an ambiguous place, one that suggests unsettling truths about humans while never quite revealing what it knows.”