A Nazi’s son tells Book Fair how he became a Jew

By Jack Forman

ENCINITAS, California — Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger captivated an audience of about 250 people at Temple Solel on Sunday, November 9 with an honest, moving, and provocative 45-minute talk at the Jewish Book Fair about his stranger-than-fiction life growing up in post-World War II Germany, converting to Judaism, raising a family in Israel, and serving in the IDF.

Born in 1958 in the small southern German town of Bamberg (close to Nuremberg) to parents who were enthusiastic and unrepentant Nazis (his father was a Nazi tank commander and a highly decorated Wehrmacht soldier), Wollschlaeger as a child greatly admired his parents. But as an adolescent, he began to question the sanitized stories they told him about the war. His father, for example, refused to talk about his role in the war other than to glorify the military heroics for which he was given a medal. And when Wollschlaeger asked his father about what happened to the Jews, he refused to discuss the issue.

For Wollschlaeger, everything came to a head in 1972 when he was 14. Palestinian terrorists had stormed the Israeli living quarters at the Munich Olympics, murdering some athletes outright and taking the others hostage (except for one who escaped). When the German government’s attempt to rescue the hostages ended tragically with the death of all the Israeli hostages, German newspapers the next day had banner headlines: Jews Again Killed in Germany. He asked his father about what that meant, and his father stonewalled the question. When his teachers at school, whom he greatly trusted, revealed to him the crimes of the Third Reich and the details of the Holocaust, he again went to his father and was told that Bernd’s teachers were all communist and the Holocaust never happened.

This was the beginning of his alienation from his family. And it was the beginning of a long journey that started with his search in Germany to understand what it meant to be a Jew and what Judaism was all about. He became involved with a small Orthodox synagogue in Bamberg and became their Shabbos Goy. In return, they agreed to teach him about the Jewish faith and culture. When Wollschlaeger was a child, he had served as an altar boy in a Roman Catholic church in Bambuerg (his mother was Catholic, his father was Protestant), and a former priest to whom he was close suggested to him that he meet Israelis his age visiting Germany for a conference run by Neve Shalom (an Israeli organization supporting cooperation between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews). He made close friends at this conference, and soon after, he visited Israel (1978). There, he fell in love with the country, became romantically involved with a young Israeli woman, started medical school there and was encouraged to pursue further study of Judaism. When he returned to Germany, he completed his medical degree and converted to Judaism in 1986 – an act that caused his parents to disown him.

After this break with his family, he immigrated to Israel and became an Israeli citizen under the Law of Return, served in the IDF as a medical officer, married an American Jewish woman and began to raise a family. But when the Gulf War broke out five years later, he and his family emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Miami because his wife was frightened by the Saddam Hussein’s Scuds attack on Israeli civilians. (He and his wife divorced three years later, and he later re-married.)

Until his son was 14 years old, Wollschlaeger was so embarrassed by and ashamed of his father that he never spoke of him. But when his son’s class was assigned a research project and speech about each student’s grandparents, Wollschlaeger decide to break his silence, and he told his son the whole story. When his son excitedly revealed the information in the report, the teacher and principal thought the 14-year old was making it up and called Wollschlaeger into the office to explain his son’s bizarre “behavior”. To the principal’s surprise, Wollschlaeger hesitantly confirmed the story. The school immediately recognized the story’s spiritual power and asked him to retell it to each class. Going public with his story at his son’s school led him to go public with the story completely, eventually resulting in the publication of his book A German Life: Against All Odds, Change is Possible (Emor Publishing, 2009). Since the book was published, Wollschlaeger has recounted his fascinating and courageous saga to many groups throughout the U.S. and Europe and in Israel.

In the question period following the talk, Wollschlaeger candidly provided his view on Germany today (very positive); on John Adams’s controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer (very negative); on the rise of world anti-Semitism since the Gaza War (a real threat that must be directly confronted); and on American actions in World War II and after (questionable, especially in regard to the refusal to bomb concentration camps and to the post-war whitewashing of German scientists’ support of Nazism and the Holocaust in order to use their services in the Cold War against the Soviets).

In his San Diego Jewish Book Fair talk, Wollschlaeger did not cover all the material that appears in his book. The talk was focused on the dramatic turning points in his story about coming to terms with his family and Germany and how this played out in his journey to becoming Jewish. A fuller view of his life and why he feels it is important to tell can be found in a recording of an interview he had on NPR (National Public Radio) in 2013: https://soundcloud.com/leomega_usa/bernd-wollschlaegers-story .

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Jack Forman is a freelance writer and college librarian based in San Diego.   He may be contacted via jack.forman@sdjewishworld.com