How my grandparents duped the Nazis to survive

JAMES Wolffe, Lord Advocate of Scotland and the country’s chief prosecutor, is looking at a piece of his past. It is a picture of his grandparents Hildegard and Walter Schmidt. Hildegard is leaning back slightly against her husband and there’s the beginning of a smile on her face, as if Walter’s just told her a joke and she’s trying not to laugh.

What you can’t see, though, in the old grey snap of Hildegard and Walter is the dark outline: what the couple had to endure in Nazi Germany and how, more than 70 years later, it has helped form the values and ideals of Scotland’s top lawyer.

The Lord Advocate is looking at the photograph, and a few others from his family collection, in a basement room of the Garnethill synagogue in Glasgow and he’s doing it in the same way that he speaks: carefully, slowly and shyly.

As the head of the prosecution system and the man who provides legal advice to the Scottish Government, Wolffe has a higher profile than almost any other lawyer in the country – a profile raised even further by his role in defending the Holyrood Brexit Bill at the Supreme Court over the summer. And yet it would be hard to imagine a man less suited to fame of sorts that comes with his job than this cautious and introverted 55-year-old advocate. Today’s visit to the synagogue is for the Lord Advocate to find out more about its archives centre, which works to preserve and disseminate information about the Jewish experience in Scotland, as well as to deposit a file of papers on the Wolffe family, including the picture of Hildegard and Walter.

Wolffe himself doesn’t identify as Jewish; neither did his father, the late Antony Wolffe, who was brought up a Lutheran, but his grandmother was from a prominent Jewish family in Berlin and Wolffe has become increasingly interested in that