Born into a lower-middle class family in Berlin in 1881, Curt Max Prufer received a Ph.D. in Arabic studies from the University of Erlangen in 1906 and joined the Imperial German foreign service a year later as an interpreter.
He served in Egypt before World War I; during the war he was an intelligence officer in Palestine and Syria, helping to organize the German-Turkish assaults against the British at the Suez Canal.
While serving as a German intelligence officer with the Turkish army in Palestine, Prufer recruited several Russian Jews and other Jews in the region to spy for Germany in Egypt. However, his mistrust of Jews and Zionists appeared in a report in 1915 to the brutal Ottoman governor for Palestine and Syria, Djemal Pasha, in which Prufer erroneously characterized such forces as "international" and as conspiring with the Entente to defeat Germany
He survived the German defeat and the Revolution of 1918. Although despising the new Weimar Republic, he continued in the Foreign Ministry (Auswartiges Artit), served in diplomatic posts in Soviet Georgia (Tiflis) and Ethiopia, and became a part of the social and political elite that dominated the ministry.
The ministry recalled him to Berlin in 1930 as deputy director of its Anglo-American and Oriental division, a position he retained when Hitler seized power three years later.
According to C M Pueer's son he met Dr. M. Wiezemann in Jerusalem after he became persona non grata" in Egypt and before the break of World War 1. The relationship was romantic and she is mentioned in his correspondence several times in an intimate way. This did not prevent hime from enlisting him as a spy and dispatching her to Cairo. [See "Sources"]
