Two against all: a touching love story of a Nazi and a Jewish woman

On March 30, 1943, 46-year-old Willy Schultz shot another German soldier and voluntarily surrendered to Soviet partisans. And all this in order to save from the ghetto an 18-year-old beauty named Ilsa Stein, and with her 25 other Jews.

The love story of a Nazi officer and a concentration camp prisoner still excites the minds of historians. Could there really be a flutter of emotion between two people so different? How it all happened, read in our material.

The biography of Willy Schultz can be called "standard" for that time. At first, the man served in the army, fought for Hitler in the Air Force, was wounded, after which he was transferred to the supply company and became the head of the quartermaster service in Minsk. It was there that he first saw his future lover – 18-year-old Ilse Stein, who was brought to the ghetto from Frankfurt am Main.

They say that Willie lost his mind as soon as he looked into her ocean-deep eyes. Naturally, he could not openly show his feelings for the girl, so Schultz began to show signs of attention in a different way. At first, the quartermaster, in order to somehow ease Ilsa's fate, appointed her as a foreman of the detachment, and her friend Lisa as an assistant. Then the former officer began to secretly bring the girl bread and soup, which was fed to the military. And when the SS organized mass raids in the ghetto, Schultz detained hundreds of Jews under his command for three days, so that the young Ilse could not be harmed.

His courtship of the girl, you might say, bore fruit – soon Ilsa began to respond to Willie in return. The lovers often communicated when no one saw them, and sometimes even held hands. But no matter how careful the man was, soon one of his colleagues suspected something was wrong. So in the personal file of Schultz there was an entry about "suspicion of desecration of the Aryan race", but due to the lack of direct evidence of his guilt, the quartermaster managed to avoid punishment.

But Willy knew that when the Jews finished their work in the ghetto, the Germans would send them to the gas chambers, and Ilsa would be no exception. Therefore, the officer decided to go against the Fuhrer and his country, and organized a plan to escape the girl from the ghetto. On March 30, 1943, he told another Nazi that some prisoners needed to be taken to unload the wagons. In addition to Ilsa and Lisa, 10 more women and 13 men climbed into the three-ton truck. Schultz ordered the car to be driven toward the woods…

The closer they got to their destination, the more suspicion crept into the driver's mind. "Mr. Captain, there may be partisans here!" the non-commissioned officer said to Schultz, but Schultz only replied to keep quiet and continue on his way. Soon the driver realized that they were going straight to the "enemy's lair", stopped the car and began to run. Then the German in love had to kill him by firing a pistol, because he simply could not fail the "operation to save Ilse".

Schultz got behind the wheel and drove the Jews to the location of the partisan detachment. He himself surrendered to them, promising to tell them all the information of interest. His testimony as a result contributed to the successful Soviet bombing of Nazi targets in Minsk. In the fall, Ilsa Stein and Willy Schultz were safely transported to Moscow.

There, the lovers spent two months together at the NKVD dacha in Malakhovka, but later they had to part. The ex-captain was sent to the Central Anti-Fascist School, where he was to be trained for underground activities in Germany. Ilsa soon discovered that she was pregnant, so for safety reasons, she was offered to move to Birobidzhan. There the girl gave birth.

Unfortunately, the boy who was born did not live very long and died as an infant.

Lisa Gudkovich, Ilsa Stein and Raisa Gitlina. Minsk, 1990

Ilsa never saw the father of her child again. As it turned out later, Willy Schultz fell ill with meningitis and died on December 31, 1944. The girl saved by him remained alive, got a job as a cutter in a factory, got married in 1953 and soon gave birth to a daughter.

According to the memoirs of some of her relatives, Ilsa once allegedly confessed that she went to contact the Nazi only to save herself and her loved ones from the ghetto. The girl herself said that all her life she loved Willy Schultz and suffered very much when fate separated them.

As it really was, we will never know. But it is known for sure that on October 21, 1943, a few months after the escape of Willy Schultz and Ilse Stein, the Minsk ghetto was finally destroyed, and all its prisoners were killed in the gas chambers. If it hadn't been for the German's sympathy for the young Jewish woman, she and the people in that truck would have undoubtedly met the same fate. Therefore, we can say that this is the case when love saved human lives.