Jon Wertheim: What do you suspect might have happened? Early on in World War II, the Army realized it needed German- and Italian-speaking U.S. soldiers for a variety of duties, including psychological warfare, interrogation, espionage and intercepting enemy communications. Among the unusual sights at Ritchie: a team of U.S. soldiers dressed in German uniforms. Guy Stern, a Bronze Star Medal recipient who attended, said: Ritchie Boy Dr. To do so, they learned photo analysis, terrain analysis, aerial reconnaissance, enemy army analysis, interrogation, signals intelligence and much more.. WebIn the United States at the end of World War II, there were prisoner-of-war camps, including 175 Branch Camps serving 511 Area Camps containing over 425,000 prisoners of war (mostly German).The camps were located all over the US, but were mostly in the South, due to the higher expense of heating the barracks in colder areas. Of the nearly 20,000 Ritchie Boys who served in WWII, around 140 were killed in action, including at the costly One can also point to a Ritchie Boy who was given the opportunity to shape the critically important program of psychological warfare by training nearly all the 850 members of the Mobile Radio Broadcasting Companies. The Ritchie Boys practiced street fighting in life-size replicas of German villages and questioned mock civilians in full scale German homes. Jewish soldiers were in great danger if captured, and two were captured and executed due to being identified by their captors as German-born Jews. A nonpartisan, federal educational institution, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is Americas national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust dedicated to ensuring the permanence of Holocaust memory, understanding, and relevance. Jon Wertheim: I imagine all of a sudden no one wants to admit to being a Nazi. He still works six days a week. David Frey: They made a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought - the entire sets of battles on the Western Front. Following the war, some of the Ritchie Boys were interrogators during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. When Hitler came to power, the Bromberts fled to France, and then to the U.S. David Frey: There are a whole variety of prominent Ritchie Boys. Engraved on the award are the words from Wiesels Nobel Prize acceptance speech, One person of integrity can make a difference., About the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. You're in Belgium? did not have the opportunity to serve overseas, he was able to make a significant contribution as an interrogator at Fort Hunt and as the principal facilitator in the integration of German Paperclip scientists and engineers such as Wernher von Braun into our society. David Frey: They were in fact. It was here that over 19,000 Ritchie Boys, many of them German-Jewish immigrants from Europe Additional valuable information on the Ritchie Boys may be found in a forum-type Facebook page, , ably managed with considerable devotion by Bernie Lubran, son of Ritchie Boy, , and by Josh Freeling, whose great uncle was Ritchie Boy. Amid the chaos of war, Guy Stern and the other Ritchie Boys had a job to do. Mothers Day.. Paul Fairbrook: Well, because it was an unusual part of the United States Army. David Frey: This is where the having an intelligence officer from Camp Ritchie was of critical importance. There were roughly 9000 of these Jews in America and they specialized in the interrogation of German prisoners. Victor Brombert: I remember being up on a cliff the first night over Omaha beach. He responded with just the information I needed. As Nazi persecution of Jews intensified in the late 1930s, desperate families often found they could get only a single child out of Germany via the efforts of Jewish relief agencies. Jon Wertheim: Sixty percent of the actionable intelligence? Ritchie Boys also collected evidence which led to the prosecution of many high ranking Nazis including Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe; Rudolph Hess, deputy furher to Adolf Hitler; and Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Wehrmacht, Germany's armed forces. Their mission: to use their knowledge of the German language and culture to return to Europe and fight Naziism. Another was, , a member of the Mormon faith, who was awarded the prestigious Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroic actions in the Battle of the Philippines. I was the only one to get out. Drawing on archival research, memoirs and interviews with several Ritchie Boys (there were 1,985 in all), he focuses on a half dozen. You want to convince them that you're trustworthy. He was shot right away and killed. They fought with the American military in the lands they had recently escaped, helping to turn the course of the war. When the war was over, their German accents and unusual In 2011, the Holocaust Memorial Center, in Farmington Hills, Michigan, hosted an exhibit of the Ritchie Boys' exploits. It was an impact on war crimes. After the war, Guy Stern, Victor Brombert, Paul Fairbrook and Max Lerner came home, married, and went to Ivy League schools on the G.I. Background. Besides their language ability, these soldiers were familiar with the culture and thinking of enemy soldiers, which would aid them in their efforts. Bruce Hendersons account of the Ritchie Boys, as the camps graduates came to be known, is full of arresting moments like Sellings arrival, almost all of them virtually unknown. Max Lerner: There were no Nazis. Right. When U.S. soldiers fought Germany during World War II, there was one group that was particularly motivatedabout 2,000 mostly German and Austrian Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis and then returned to Europe to take on their tormentors as members of American military intelligence. They took their name from the place they trained - Camp Ritchie, Maryland a secret American military intelligence center during the war. Jon Wertheim: As a way to honor your family that perished. Guy Stern: None of my family survived. The 10 digit ISBN is 0811769968 and the 13 digit ISBN is 9780811769969. They knew the psychology and the Never. They also drafted and dropped leaflets from airplanes behind enemy lines. We now know that this perception needs to be broadened. Be the first to learn about news, service member stories and fundraising updates from USO. And I needed to get my own back. 202.437.1221 Contact. The Ritchie Boys: Americas Secret Weapon Against the Nazis | by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Memory & Action | Medium 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. Now 98, Fairbrook is the former dean of the Culinary Institute of America. ahollinger@ushmm.org. The danger from the German side, of course, was far higher. Jon Wertheim: All in service of winning the war? As a Jew, I knew I might not be treated exactly by the Geneva rules. Paul Fairbrook: (laugh) You bet your life I'm proud of the Ritchie Boys. They were heroes not necessarily or predominantly based on bravery but on their intelligence and deserving of the name Secret Heroes. Eager to fight the Nazis, he, too joined the Army. And we were strafed and I said to myself, uh, "now, it's the end' because I could you could feel the machine gun bullets. We were all on the same wavelength. Harmony Jones, a military child, shares how being raised in a military family helped shape her future for success. Many of the 15,200 selected were Jewish soldiers who fled Nazi-controlled Germany, which was systematically killing Jews. The soldiers were sent for training to The Ritchie Boys were one of World War IIs greatest secret weapons for U.S. Army intelligence, said Stuart E. Eizenstat, shortly before becoming chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2022, when the museum bestowed the Ritchie Boys with the Elie Wiesel Award, its highest honor. Early on in the war, the Army realized it needed German- and Italian-speaking U.S. soldiers for a variety of duties, including psychological warfare, interrogation, espionage and intercepting enemy communications. Some didn't even go over to to Europe. These are people who made massive contributions. David Frey is a professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. And incredibly, they were responsible for most of the combat intelligence gathered on the Western Front. WebMany of them, like Brombert, were Jewish. Look, I got a book here and it tells me that you were here and you went there and your boss was this." David Frey: I think they did. As part of denazification, photos of Nazi atrocities were posted in German shop windows and Ritchie Boys led the country's citizens on tours of the concentration camps to educate the local population about the evil Hitler had perpetrated. Individual Ritchie Boys were cited for their contributions by being awarded over 60 Silver Star Medals for bravery. Guy Stern speaks at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Centers Ritchie Boys exhibit and reunion at Farmington Hills, Michigan in 2011. Why do so few Americans know about this? Those were the heroes. Max Lerner: Or they had an effort to erase it. The intent of this web page, in addition to providing demographics and statistics not available elsewhere, will be to highlight individual secret heroes whose contributions were also singularly significant. Victor Brombert: My parents were pacifists so the idea of my going to war was for them calamitous, however they realized that it was a necessary war, especially for us. I asked them to leave it off. And to take those heights against heavy firing, going up those steep cliffs, and of course, it had been done. Jon Wertheim: What were you trained to do? Martha Cesaro, a military spouse, shares what inspired her to start giving back to the military community through the USO. The intelligence they gathered was coveted by higher commanda postwar Pentagon report ascribed more than half of the credible battlefield intelligence gathered in Europe to the Ritchie Boys. There were 1,985 German born Ritchie Boys. By the summer of 1944, German troops in Normandy were outnumbered and overpowered. The soldiers were sent for training to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, beginning June 19, 1942, where they trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center thus their nickname, the Ritchie Boys.. Fred Frommer is a historian and writer, and author of several books, including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals. But ask him about his most formative experience - and he doesn't hesitate. It was hard for us not to notice that beyond the stories runs a deep sense of pride. Gross wrote to me saying, My It turns out that author J.D. After Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, many of those sons were eager to return to Europe and find their families. They took their name from the place they trained - Camp Ritchie, Maryland a secret American military intelligence center during the war. Ritchie Boy Dr. Many Ritchie Boys took the precaution of anglicizing their names and altering their dog tags by replacing the H for Hebrewa guide to their burial service should the worst happenwith P for Protestant. I think that's quantifiable. You know a lot about them already. After the war, Guy Stern and the other Ritchie Boys were celebrated for their achievements. Divisions that liberated concentration camps included hundreds of Ritchie Boys, who interviewed survivors. Andrew Hollinger I gave myself all the accouterments of looking like a fierce Russian commissar. And that's why civilians could be useful and soldiers could be useful, "where is the minefield?" A contribution made by a single individual, especially if one or more lives are saved, is generally recognized as truly heroic. So was Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. That was the biggest weakness that the Army recognized that it had, which was battlefield intelligence and the interrogation needed to talk to sometimes civilians, most of the time prisoners of war, in order to glean information from them. Giving out some cigarettes also helps a lot. Victor Brombert: We were supposed to arrest important Nazi officials. Dabringhaus went on to write a book about the experience called Klaus Barbie: The Shocking Story of How the U.S. Used this Nazi War Criminal as an Intelligence Agent.. Victor Brombert: I saw immense debris. Now is it because they were afraid that the Nazis might come back, that it's not over? Other Ritchie Boys were able to express their motivation and accomplishments in memoirs with titles such as I Must Be a Part of This War and A Few Who Made a Difference. Nina Wolff Feld told her fathers story in Someday You Will Understand: My Fathers Private World War 2. Guy Stern: Out of a plane. You on one side and we on this side. There were two who were actually captured at the Battle of the Bulge. Sons and Soldiers concentrates on six of them, two deadincluding Selling, who passed away at 86 in 2004but who left detailed memoirs, and four still flourishing in their 90s. Some never went back to Europe, but one retired to Berlin in 1988 and spent his final years visiting German schools to talk about his childhood under Hitler. Jon Wertheim: Why did you want to enlist initially? It was also in Europe that some of them, like Guy Stern, learned what had happened to the families they left behind. One of these was. I can look anybody straight in their eye and say I think I've earned the right to be an American. Two Ritchie Boys were identified as German-language interrogators working for the Americans after they were captured in a Nazi counterattack; revealed to be Jewish, the men were summarily executed. Many of these soldiers landed at Normandy, France, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and others followed to perform their specialized tasks, which provided advanced intelligence to allied forces regarding German war plans and tactics. Guy Stern: Yes, even last night. Paul Fairbrook: Oh that is a very good question. Ritchie Boys Image by Sons and Soldiers. A significant number of people, even those with some knowledge of Camp Ritchie, appear to visualize a graduate of the Armys Military Intelligence Training Center as follows: A physically-challenged man of the Jewish faith, who was born in Germany or Austria, joined the U. S. Army, and after being trained at Camp Ritchie served in the European Theater in World War II as an interrogator in relative safety behind the lines. Jon Wertheim: This was really a broad range of intelligence activities. As members of the Ritchie Boys, German and Austrian refugees offered language skills and knowledge that proved vital to American military intelligence.
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