A few years ago, I told the story of Hitler’s Jewish soldiers, men of partial Jewish descent who served in the German armed forces during World War II. There were even full Jews who hid in plain sight by enlisting in Hitler’s military, using forged documents to conceal their identity. You rarely hear about Nazis who ended up working for Israel, but it happened. Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s famed commando leader, served as a killer for the Mossad.
Even Walter Rauff, the SS colonel who invented the mobile gas vans on the Eastern Front, supplied intelligence to Israel while working for the dictatorship in Syria. Rauff died a free man in Chile in 1984. But an actual SS man serving in the Israeli Defense Force? That sounds absurd.
In one case, it was completely true. Ulrich Schnaft was born in Königsberg, Germany, in 1923. His mother abandoned him at an orphanage, and he was adopted by another German family. At 17, he joined the Waffen SS, serving in the 5th SS Panzer Division Viking on the Eastern Front.
In 1943, a Soviet shell fragment wounded him, earning him a wound badge and a hospital stay in Germany. After recovering, he was sent to fight partisans in Yugoslavia, then to Italy, where the Americans captured him near the Po River in late 1944. He spent years in POW camps, was investigated for war crimes, and was cleared. Released, he moved to Munich, sharing a room with a Holocaust survivor who received financial aid from a US charity.
Schnaft had little money and noticed his roommate’s monthly payments. He concluded it paid to be a Jewish Holocaust survivor, so he decided to become one. He adopted the name Gavriel Weissman, applied for aid as a survivor, and received it. With the world still in chaos and documentation destroyed, no one questioned his story.
He boarded an illegal ship carrying Jews to Palestine, but the British intercepted it, and he was sent to an internment camp on Cyprus. In the camp, he joined a militant Zionist group tied to the Haganah. When Israel gained independence, he was released and allowed in. He lived on a kibbutz, learned Hebrew, and joined the IDF.
He fought in the independence war, served well, rose to sergeant, then became an officer in the reserve artillery. He reached the rank of captain, active in the Mapai party under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. But when he sought a full-time commission, Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, had doubts. In 1952, they opened a file on Captain Weissman, wondering who this blond, blue-eyed officer really was.
Fellow officers had reported disturbing behavior at a party where Schnaft, very drunk, showed them photographs of himself in a Waffen SS uniform. He laughed it off as a Purim costume. He was also suspected of stealing ammunition from an army base, and an investigation found quantities of rounds in his quarters. Shin Bet could not take seriously the idea that an SS veteran was serving as an IDF officer.
It seemed too far-fetched. So, they simply declined to extend his commission. Schnaft was discharged and moved to Ashkelon, where he boarded at a house run by a German Jewish couple. Soon, he began an affair with the landlord’s wife and was thrown out.
He left with her. Hearing of West Germany’s economic miracle, they decided to go there. In 1954, they sailed to Genoa and visited the West German consulate. Schnaft, still under his assumed Israeli identity, was denied entry because Israel was boycotting West Germany, and Israeli passports were marked as invalid for entry.
His girlfriend, holding a German passport, left him in Genoa and went ahead. Penniless and abandoned, Schnaft went to the consulate and confessed everything: he was an SS veteran, not Jewish, using a false name, and his real nationality was German. The diplomats did not believe him. So, he decided to sell the only thing he had left: information about the IDF.
He contacted the Egyptian consulate and offered Israeli military secrets in exchange for entry into West Germany and payment. They questioned him, deemed him genuine, and sent him to Cairo. President Nasser, who hated Israel, ordered a full debriefing. For two weeks, Schnaft told them everything he knew about the Israeli military.
But the Egyptians realized he was only a low-ranking captain, and the information, while interesting, was not particularly valuable. Still, they honored their deal, giving him money and papers to enter West Germany. He returned and got a job at his aunt’s pharmacy. For some reason, he contacted his ex-girlfriend and confessed everything: that he was an SS veteran, not Jewish, and that he had betrayed Israel to Egypt.
Instead of winning her back, she was horrified and told her husband. The husband, eager for revenge over the affair, told Mossad everything. Tel Aviv was furious. They dispatched agents to Germany, likely to assassinate him.
But instead, they came up with a plan to lure him back to Israel and punish him legally. They used a classic honey trap: a beautiful female agent seduced him. After weeks, she introduced him to her “friend,” Adnan bin Adnan, who was actually a Mossad agent named Shmuel Moriah, pretending to be an Iraqi army officer. During lunch at a Berlin restaurant, Moriah accidentally dropped a forged Iraqi officer’s identity card.
Schnaft spotted it and launched into an anti-Semitic tirade, directly asking if he could work as a spy for Iraq. Moriah agreed, and Schnaft was briefed for a mission into Israel: photograph a sensitive site. He still carried his Israeli passport, having no idea that Mossad knew exactly who he was. The moment he landed at Tel Aviv Airport, he was arrested.
Placed on trial for spying against Israel for Egypt, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. Released after five, he was kicked out of Israel and told never to return. He married, had a family, and raised his children Jewish. When his daughter’s bat mitzvah came, he asked the Israeli government for permission to return and celebrate.
They refused, of course. Schnaft lived out his quiet life in Germany until his death in 2013. Ulrich Schnaft went from SS man to IDF officer to Egyptian spy and nearly an Iraqi spy.
His story remains one of the strangest in the history of Israel, yet it was completely true.
