On a hill overlooking the town of Sonthofen, on the edge of the Bavarian Alps, lies a former school for educating the next generation of the Nazi elite that has been used as a base by Germany’s Bundeswehr, or armed forces, since 1956. A few streets away lies a barracks built in 1936 for the Wehrmacht’s mountain troops.

Today that barracks is home to a Bundeswehr school for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense, and it is there that Lt. Levi — one of an estimated 300 Jewish soldiers serving in the German military — is stationed.

Like many German towns, Sonthofen is inextricably linked to the Holocaust — which affected Levi’s own family.

“I obviously cannot ignore the history of this place,” says the 33-year-old biologist, who asked to use a pseudonym due to the secretive nature of his work for the military.

For Levi, the Bundeswehr is the army of a free and democratic Germany: “The Bundeswehr does not stand in the tradition of National Socialism.”

The former Nazi school, he notes, is now known as the Generaloberst-Beck-Kaserne, named after one of the participants in the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler.

“That’s a kind of simultaneity you have to be able to live with,” Levi says.

Born in Estonia, Levi came to Germany with his family in the early 1990s as a Jewish refugee. Two of his great-grandfathers had been killed fighting the Nazis as Red Army soldiers.

Eight decades after Word War II, Levi describes himself as a “Jewish German.” And as such, he wants to defend his country and what it stands for.

For a long time following WWII, the idea of a Jew serving as an officer in the Bundeswehr was considered unthinkable within Germany’s Jewish community. However, with an increasing national push for renewed mandatory conscription and a Jewish community head calling on his constituents to “do their part” for the country, the idea is no longer verboten.

The Bundeswehr was founded in 1955 — only 10 years after the end of WWII, in which the Wehrmacht was instrumental in the murder of 6 million Jews. While the new West German army was part of NATO and committed to democratic values, it did not make a clean break with the past in its personnel: Nearly all of the roughly 15,000 officers in the young Bundeswehr had previously served in the Wehrmacht, and around 300 had been members of the Waffen-SS.

The small Jewish community of the early Federal Republic consisted predominantly of concentration camp survivors and a handful of Jews who had returned from exile. It was barely conceivable at the time that they or their children would ever again serve in a German army — nor were they required to. Jews persecuted under the Nazis and their descendants were granted an exemption: until the abolition of compulsory military service in 2011, they were excused from the draft.

“We are talking about a completely different era than today,” says Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Since the end of National Socialism, there have been “profound changes” in Germany, Schuster says.

Schuster was born in 1954 in Haifa and moved as a toddler with his parents to the Bavarian town of Würzburg, where they had lived before fleeing the Nazis.

As president of the Central Council, which represents roughly half of the estimated 200,000 Jews in Germany, Schuster is now........

© The Times of Israel