Bernd Wollschlaeger was raised by a Nazi tank commander, who was awarded a Knight's Cross by Adolf Hitler for his military exploits on the eastern front.
Growing up, he perceived his father as a heroic figure, a “knight in shining armour.”
Today, as a 62 year old physician in Miami, Dr Wollschlaeger looks back on his life as a proud Jew who served in the IDF as a medical officer.
His path to conversion and Aliyah began when he was 14, at the time of the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The terrorist attack on Israeli athletes claimed 11 lives and shook the young Bernd. “It was a national tragedy,” he says. “My father was very angry about it. But not because Jews were killed in German soil, but because the Jews again ‘tarnished’ the image of Germany in the world.”
Witnessing his father react to the tragedy was a “turning point” for Mr Wollschlaeger.
It marked the beginning of a long journey that eventually led to his conversion to Judaism and move to Israel.
“I didn’t wake up one morning and say ‘let’s convert to Judaism,’” he says. Rather, the process was partly inspired by a growing understanding of the Shoah as the “deliberate planned tactic and strategy of a democratically elected government.”
“The shock, the shame, motivated me,” he said, as did “getting to know Jews and travelling to Israel, and getting to know history, I embraced the concept of Judaism.”
Dr Wollschlaeger, who initially volunteered as a “shabbos goy” in a small congregation in his native Bavarian town, said he gradually “grew into the world of Judaism”.
His desire to convert was initially met with some scepticism within the Jewish community, he says, recalling a conversation with a synagogue chair who suggested he was trying to “victimise.”
“In the beginning I was motivated by guilt, but I completed the process with conviction.”
His father, who died in 1987, “called me a traitor and evicted me from the house.” Despite his mother’s efforts to reconcile the father and son, the chasm was “impossible to bridge.”
Dr Wollschlaeger, who initially felt unable to discuss his father’s ideology, hopes sharing his story will foster greater tolerance and awareness of “the consequences of hatred.”
“We all are the children of god,” he says. “We need to communicate and I’m not native but this is the only way for us to survive as humans.”
Dr Wollschlaeger, who raised his three children to be Jewish, recounted his life journey in his 2007 memoir A German Life.
