A Nazi's Son Serves In the Israeli Army!

Jewish Learning Institute ^ | 14/10/21 | Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger

[Eleutheria5]

Son of Wehrmacht officer involved in war crimes, grew up in Bamburg, Germany, converted to Judaism. Father disowned him, unrepentant Nazi.

[Eleutheria5]

Remarkable person, remarkable story.

[GOP Poet]

Wow. I look forward to reading this.

[fidelis]

It’s a YouTube video.

[Does so]

Large Wehrmacht cemetery in Bamburg:

tinyurl.com/kzfpmk6

[GOP Poet]

lol. Even better!!! :D

[faithhopecharity]

Saving and protecting Jewish lives instead of murdering them like his daddy. Congratulations to this young man.

[TheDandyMan]

Kind of sad when he got to the part about finally returning to Germany to reconcile with his parents and then said he visited their graves. I was hoping he’d say they made their peace.

Fighting in WW2 from the invasion of Poland to the 2nd-to-last month of the war, including being wounded, was probably psychologically damaging in the extreme. It’s easy to imagine that sacrificing so much for so long to the losing side would lead to an inability to cope with certain historical events, along with the alcoholism.

[Eleutheria5]

I’ll pencil in feeling empathy for a dead Nazi war criminal’s PTSD somewhere in 2050, when all the carbon emissions will probably have killed me anyway, if old age hasn’t.

[TheDandyMan]

My point is that what ailed the father defined the son, antithetically. If his father hadn’t been so adversarial and defiant about the whole situation it seems unlikely that Dr. Wollschlaeger’s life trajectory would be anything similar to what is has been. As such the cause of the father’s mindset is rather of interest.

[Eleutheria5]

Oh. Ok, then. That is a telling point.

[Eleutheria5]

Interesting, though, that only Eichmann’s youngest son ever renounced his world view. The rest of his children were die-hard Nazis. Perhaps fact that he was not an alcoholic had something to do with it, or the fact that he was a high-level bureaucrat instead of a Wehrmacht officer doing all Eichmann’s dirty work in the field and imperfectly trying to live with it, like the good doctor’s father.