A former SS soldier finds his true calling as a member of the Chosen Nation

Photos Mendel Photography

T

o those who see him shopping in the kosher grocery in Edgware, London, a velvet yarmulke atop his snowy mane, Yitzchak von Schweitzer is another friendly older face in an increasingly chareidi and youthful neighborhood. Still active at 97 years old, he could be anyone’s great-grandfather.

Even if you happen to know his name, with its aristocratic Germanic overtones, or catch the shades of South African in his accent, there’s no hint of anything out of the ordinary.

But Yitzchak von Schweitzer is no run-of-the-mill retiree, come to spend his golden years puttering around this sedate London suburb.

He’s a man who’s been on a journey and a man with a past — one that contrasts strangely with his current humdrum surroundings.

Born Helmut von Schweitzer to a family of Austrian Catholic aristocracy, he served in the Hitler Youth, fought in the Waffen SS against the Russians, removed unexploded ordnance in London’s blitzed ruins, then became a successful businessman in South Africa where he and his wife (Pam, now Rivka) converted to become Orthodox Jews.

For many years, Yitzchak didn’t hide that astonishing biography, but neither did he advertise it. He well knew that his short service in the combat branch of the SS, together with his subsequent conversion, raised uncomfortable questions.

So he largely stayed quiet. Those who sat next to him in his local shul in South Africa and then Edgware knew him as the pleasant, unassuming gentleman who put on his tefillin, attended shiurim, conscientiously asked sh’eilos from his local rabbi, and donated toward the shul’s youth program.

From the vantage point of decades, though, Yitzchak von Schweitzer is now able to survey his past and the questions he wrestles with. After a process of soul-searching that has taken years to unfold, he’s decided to share his journey through a self-published memoir.

“For much of my life, I left my Nazi and brief Waffen-SS experience unmentioned as something that could only stir up trouble and rejection for me,” he says. “After all, what choice did I have? Yet I did have a choice; several in fact. I could have chosen otherwise with dire consequences. That would have required a boy with more insight, conviction, and courage than I had at that time.”

But beyond the personal reflection that as Helmut he was part of the Nazi war machine, Yitzchak’s story contains nuance about the bystanders to the Holocaust.

His story is about the millions of Germans who, in a murderous, anti-Semitic state, may not have supported the warmongering, but refused to think about the killing machine that their country had become.

It’s about a whole generation of postwar Germans who scorned as unpatriotic anyone who highlighted the Fatherland’s failings.

And it’s about those rare individuals like Yitzchak himself who felt driven to do the unthinkable even after Nazism’s defeat: leave the German Volk behind to join their victims.

From the vantage point of decades, Yitzchak von Schweitzer, 97, is able to face the questions he still wrestles with

Heirs and Graces

When Yitzchak von Schweitzer stands at his living room window, he sees two worlds and three centuries. Outside is all the bustle of a Jewish neighborhood: front doors do brisk business, children ride their bikes, and parents maneuver large family cars through the streets.

Inside, behind him, 19th-century Austria lives on. Stern men in tail coats and women in bonnets gaze down from picture frames. A portrait of three young children from the turn of the last century dominates the wall. An imposing mansion, Schloss Gneixendorf in Lower Austria, is visible in a black-and-white photograph.

The von Schweitzers’ ancestral estate provides the backdrop for the opening scene to Yitzchak’s odyssey.