German Protestant missions were represented in the Holy Land as early as 1860, when the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses established themselves in Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter the Jerusalems-Verein began work in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and about this same time, 1869, Lutheran missionaries calling themselves Templars settled near Jaffa. Under William II additional impetus was given to German religious activities in the Near East. The Jerusalems-Verein, which was taken under the special patronage of the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, supported a Lutheran clergyman in Jerusalem and was responsible for the erection in the Holy City of the Church of the Redeemer. This same society rapidly spread its activities throughout all of Palestine, and in 1910 it dedicated the famous Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Stiftung,[22] erected on the Mount of Olives by the Hohenzollern family at a cost in excess of half a million dollars. The Evangelical Union, organized in 1896, established a large orphanage in Jerusalem, together with schools and related institutions, and proved to be a very useful auxiliary to the work of the Deaconesses in maintaining schools, dispensaries, and hospitals. Also in 1896 there was founded the Deutsche Orient Mission, which rendered its services particularly in Cilicia, and which kept up the interest of its supporters at home by the publication in Berlin of a monthly periodical, Der Christliche Orient. It was estimated that, during the early years of the twentieth century, the German Protestant societies maintained in Turkey-in-Asia about 450 missionaries and several hundred native assistants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. By 1910 the Germans occupied a conspicuous position in evangelical missions in the Near East.[23]
The German Catholics were no less zealous than their Protestant compatriots. Although for centuries Italian and French members of the Franciscan order had been
