A picture dated 1947 of a placard issued by the British police in Palestine showing 18 wanted Jewish activists from Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang (AFP)

Middle East Eye – April 16, 2026

Recently declassified Israeli archive documents have shed further light on attempts by a Zionist militia to forge a relationship with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

The documents, reported by Haaretz, reveal that Avraham Stern and other members of his Stern Gang made several attempts to forge a partnership with Nazi Germany, based in part on shared opposition to the British, who were then occupying Palestine, where the Zionist movement hoped to create a Jewish state.

Naftali Lubenchik, a Stern Gang member, was sent to meet with German representatives. A document written in 1951 stated that he believed Nazi Germany and its allies did not seek “the physical destruction of the Jewish people, but rather their expulsion from Europe and their concentration in one place…”

The documents show that in May 1941, Eliyahu Golomb, de facto commander of the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary operating in Mandatory Palestine, told a small group of people: “I have information… about suspicion regarding a group of Jews who have connections with the enemy.

“According to the information, there is a man who contacted the Germans. This man is known; his name is S,” Golomb said.

The man he was referring to was Stern, founder of the extremist Zionist armed group the Stern Gang, which split from the Irgun militia and wanted to continue fighting the British during World War Two.

Golomb’s comments were recorded at the time in a Haganah intelligence document titled “Contacts with the Axis”, referring to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their allies.

Stern and Nazi Germany

Stern, a Polish immigrant who moved to Palestine in the 1920s, advocated for increased Jewish migration and the expulsion of the “foreign” British presence from what he considered Jewish land.

His hatred of the British was so intense that he was willing to negotiate an alliance with the Nazis to expel them from the mandate.

Stern’s militia attacked British and rival Jewish targets even as World War Two raged on. The Irgun and Haganah, the two other main Zionist factions, had instituted a moratorium on attacks against the British while they fought the Nazis.

According to Haaretz, historical research documents reveal several attempts by the Stern Gang to contact German officials.

One resulted in a document proposing “active partnership” with Germany in the war, based on “shared interests between German policy and Jewish national aspirations”, and a future alliance between a Jewish state and the German Reich.

One Stern Gang member, Natan Friedman, later known as Natan Yellin-Mor and a future member of the Knesset, wrote in 1943: “Germany has not yet been defeated and may still become our ally.”

These contacts with Nazi Germany did not succeed, but the Haganah monitored them closely, Haaretz reported.

After a series of deadly bank robberies and shoot-outs, Britain’s mandatory authorities caught up with Stern, capturing and killing him in 1942 at the age of 34.

At the time, his actions were a source of embarrassment to the Zionist movement, and the Haganah went as far as hunting down members of his group.

‘Germany has no special interest in Palestine’

One of the documents reported by Haaretz describes Stern as believing that Britain had “betrayed the Jewish people and will never allow the establishment of a Jewish state”.

“On the other hand, Germany has no special interest in Palestine, and since the Nazis want to cleanse Europe of Jews, nothing is simpler than transferring them to their own state,” it said of Stern’s ideology.

The document also stated that Stern believed “it is possible to reach a practical agreement with the Germans… negotiations should be opened, and Jews of Europe should be recruited into a special army that would fight its way to Palestine and conquer it from the British”.

Additional documents reported by Haaretz state that Stern aspired “to seize control of all of Eretz Yisrael [Greater Israel] by force with the help of a foreign power,” and that he was prepared to collaborate with a “foreign power”, meaning the Nazis.

Interviewed by Middle East Eye’s Hossam Sarhan for his documentary Stern, Yair, son of Avraham Stern, played down his father’s overtures to the Nazis as an insignificant episode aimed at helping save Jews in Europe.

He argued that his father could not have known about the Holocaust, as the Nazis had not formalised their mass killing of Europe’s Jews until shortly before Avraham’s death.

Yair dismissed confessions by Stern gang members about their efforts to collaborate with the Nazis on the basis of possible duress during interrogation by the Haganah.

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