Germany’s role in the modern Middle East, with the exception of its alliance with the Ottoman Empire, was nether particularly prominent until after World War II. Yet during the 1950s and 1960s West Germany, due to its economic strength, technical capabilities and absence of a colonial past became a much sought-after partner for the developing independent states of the region. West-German – Middle Eastern cooperation could take on an “open” as well as “clandestine” character. On the one side there was the engagement of West German companies in ambitious development projects in the region; on the other hand, German personnel, often with a military, if not Nazi background, served in the armed forces of several Arab states. During the 1960s, German technical experts became central for the development of advanced weapons (high-speed aircraft and ground-to-ground rockets). As the activities of these “unofficial” Germans abroad could be both beneficial and detrimental to West Germany’s interests in the Middle East and on a global scale, the West German Foreign Intelligence Service (BND), founded as a US-led intelligence agency under the name “Org. Gehlen” and taken over by the West German government in 1956 monitored these activities intensively. The paper argues that West Germany did indeed develop an intensive partnership with several Middle Eastern states on both sides of the Arab/ Israeli divide during the 1950s and 1960s. Several factors – West Germany’s special relationship with Israel and its consequent strains on the relations with Arab states, the contradiction of cooperation with the former colonial powers in Europe and NATO and the support for anti-colonial regimes, as well as an increasingly direct involvement of the superpowers in the Middle East Conflict without recourse to a German middleman meant that West Germany lost its prominent position after the 1960s. The paper will describe and interpret West Germany’s rise and fall as a Middle Eastern “power” in the 1950s and 1960s. It is largely based on hitherto unpublished documents from the archives of the West German Intelligence Service (BND), to which the author had access due to his membership in the officially appointed Independent Commission of Historians for the History of the BND between 2013 and 2018.