Following a last minute change of plan on the part of the Swiss authorities their honeymoon was cancelled. Instead, at the end of January 1935 the couple travelled to Jaffa (as it was then commonly known) in Palestine, which since 1922 had been administered, at least for most practical purposes, as a relatively fractious territory of the British empire. Here Carl Lutz took up an appointment as a Swiss consular official: Gertrud worked alongside him, supplying (unpaid) clerical support. At some point between 1937 and 1939 (sources differ) they were relocated to nearby Tel Aviv from where, as the wife of an increasingly senior Swiss consular official, Gertrud Lutz experienced at close hand the unfolding Palestinian civil war.