Bilateral relations

It was only in 2011 that the Consulate General of the State of Israel was opened in Munich, alongside the existing embassy in Berlin. It is located at Karolinenplatz in the Maxvorstadt district. It is the only Israeli consulate general in the European Union.

The consular district includes the federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. It has the departments of press and public relations, innovation and research, culture, education and trade and economy. The consulate general is staffed by four diplomats: the consul general, the deputy consul general, the consul and the envoy for economics and trade. In total, it has almost 30 employees.

The history of the first Israeli consulate in Munich

Even though the State of Israel strictly rejected relations with Germany after its founding and, for example, banned the German language from Israeli public life, an Israeli consulate was opened at Maria-Theresia-Strasse 11 in Munich in the autumn of 1948. The consulate was not considered an institution that maintained official relations with Germany. It received its accreditation from the USA. The reason for the consulate opening was the Jewish survivors of the Nazi extermination policy, so-called displaced persons, who were mainly in camps in the Munich area. The consulate assisted the DPs in emigrating to Israel. In June 1953, the consulate was closed and the Israel Mission in Cologne opened to process the reparations payments from the Federal Republic of Germany that had been agreed in the Luxembourg Agreement.

The history of the Consulate General

On April 8, 2011, the Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer and the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman signed a joint declaration on the re-establishment of a Consulate General of the State of Israel in the Free State of Bavaria. It began its work in September 2011 and was initially located in an office building at Brienner Strasse 19 (Maxvorstadt), which was only intended as a temporary solution from the start. Since February 2012, the Consulate General has also had a trade and economic department with the Israel Trade Center, which is subordinate to the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor and was also responsible for Austria at the time. The ceremonial opening took place on July 3, 2012.

At the beginning of 2014, the decision was made to permanently house the Consulate General in a rear building belonging to the Free State of Bavaria of the then state lottery headquarters on Karolinenplatz, which moved out of the property in summer 2014. It was gutted, modernized and rebuilt for around eight million euros; the costs were shared between the Free State of Bavaria as the owner and the State of Israel as the tenant of the property.

The location was also chosen because of its symbolic historical significance in the immediate vicinity of monuments from and for the Nazi era. More than 70 years ago, Karolinenplatz and the party district in Munich's Maxvorstadt were the intellectual and political center of National Socialism, from which the architecture of the totalitarian NSDAP rule was organized.

The building of today's Consulate General is directly adjacent to the property on which the NSDAP party headquarters in Munich, the so-called "Brown House", was located on Brienner Strasse during the Nazi era and on whose property the NS Documentation Center opened in 2015, which presents and conveys Munich's problematic history as the so-called "capital of the movement". The Palais Barlow, built in 1828, was redesigned by Hitler's architect Paul Ludwig Troost as the "Brown House" and became the nucleus of the NSDAP quarter on Königsplatz. When the NSDAP came to power, the leadership demanded more space and representative rooms.

For this purpose, Troost built two structurally identical buildings on the east side of Königsplatz by 1936. To the north-west of the new Israeli consulate, the so-called "Führerbau" still stands today. It was a representative building completed in 1937, survived the war and now houses the University of Music and Theater. This was where Adolf Hitler's office was located, where he received numerous state guests and where the "Munich Agreement" was signed in 1938. Königsplatz was also the ideological center of the NSDAP. It was converted into a parade ground that the National Socialists used for various productions. On the edge of the square, between the Führer and the administration buildings, Troost built two "temples of honor." The building immediately to the south of the General Consulate once housed the NSDAP's highest party court. The building now serves as the office of Acatech, the German Academy of Engineering Sciences. The various departments of the party had partly acquired numerous buildings in the area, while Jewish owners (including the Pringsheim family, whose daughter, Katja Pringsheim, later became Thomas Mann's wife) were forced to sell and the houses were then converted for the purposes of the party. The party district in Munich's Maxvorstadt remained the intellectual and political center of National Socialism until the end of the war.

On November 10, 2015, the new headquarters of the Consulate General was inaugurated in the presence of high-ranking guests, including the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely; however, the building was not to be occupied until three months later due to a delay in the renovation. The Consulate General also has a representative office in Stuttgart.

The Consulate General building is three stories high and covers around 1000 m². The staircase is made of both Bavarian and Israeli stone. On the facade there is a graphic that combines the Bavarian diamond pattern with the Star of David; The names of Jewish personalities from Germany and sentences from the Hebrew Torah are also listed there.

Consuls General

2011–2013: Tibor Shalev Schlosser

2013–2017: Dan Shaham

2017-2021: Sandra Simovich

2021-2023: Carmela Shamir

since 2023: Talya Lador-Fresher