Ritchie Boys | 60 Minutes Archive

The Ritchie Boys: A Secret Weapon

• A secret American intelligence unit, known as the Ritchie Boys, played a significant role in World War II, consisting of many German-born Jews who fled their homeland, came to America, and joined the US Army to fight Nazism (14s).
• The Ritchie Boys trained in espionage and frontline interrogation, and were responsible for gathering most of the combat intelligence on the Western Front (40s).
• The unit trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, a secret American Military Intelligence Center, where over 11,000 soldiers underwent rigorous training in intelligence and psychological warfare starting in 1942 (2m26s).
• The purpose of the facility was to train interrogators to gather information from civilians and prisoners of war, addressing the Army's weakness in battlefield intelligence (2m38s).
• Historian David Fry notes that the Ritchie Boys were incredibly effective, gathering 60% of the actionable intelligence on the battlefield (3m10s).
• Recruits were chosen based on their knowledge of European language and culture, as well as their high IQs, with the largest set of graduates being 2,000 German-born Jews (3m42s).
• The Ritchie Boys came from diverse backgrounds, uniting for a common cause, and their shared experience forged a strong sense of unity (3m56s).

Guy Stern's Journey

• One of the last surviving Ritchie Boys, 99-year-old Guy Stern, shares his experiences of leaving Nazi Germany, escaping as a Jew, and returning to Europe to fight against the Nazis (1m36s).
• Stern grew up in a close-knit family in Hildesheim, Germany, but faced increasing hostility after Hitler took power in 1933, leading him to flee and eventually join the US Army (4m13s).
• By 1937, violence against Jews was escalating, and Gu Stern's father tried to get the family out, but they could only send one of their own to the US, choosing their eldest son, who was 15 years old at the time (4m44s).
• Gu Stern arrived in the US alone, settling with an uncle in St. Louis, and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, he immediately enlisted in the army, feeling a strong personal connection to the war (5m13s).

Joining the Cause

• Paul Fairbrook, a former dean of The Culinary Institute of America, also had a similar impulse to enlist, as his Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when he was 10 years old, and he wanted revenge on Hitler for killing his relatives (5m50s).
• Many Jewish men, including those who were not born in the US, were initially not allowed to volunteer for the military, but the government soon realized their value as a resource in the war, particularly due to their language skills (6m27s).

Training at Camp Ritchie

• The Ritchie Boys, a group of soldiers with fluent German language skills, were successful in their missions due to their knowledge of the language and the psychology of the German culture, which allowed them to effectively interrogate prisoners of war (6m41s).
• The key to being a good interrogator was understanding the subtleties of the German culture and language, which enabled the Ritchie Boys to ask more effective questions and gather valuable information (7m4s).
• Refugees like Fairbrook and Stern, as well as American-born recruits with language skills, were drafted into the army and sent to Camp Ritchie, a secret training facility in Maryland (7m34s).
• The training at Camp Ritchie included courses on interrogation techniques, terrain analysis, photo analysis, aerial reconnaissance analysis, and counterintelligence training, all of which were completed in approximately 8 weeks (8m19s).

Victor Brombert's Path to Camp Ritchie

• Victor Brombert, a 98-year-old former professor of romance languages and literature at Yale and Princeton, joined the army to fight the Nazis after his family fled from Berlin to France and then the US (9m26s).
• Brombert was born in Berlin to a Russian Jewish family and was dispatched to Camp Ritchie after recruiters found out he spoke four languages (9m33s).

Rigorous Training and Preparation

• At Camp Ritchie, the Ritchie Boys underwent strenuous classroom instruction and field exercises, including close combat training and learning how to kill a sentry from behind (9m50s).
• The training was designed to be as realistic as possible, with the Ritchie Boys practicing street fighting in life-size replicas of German villages and interrogating mock civilians and actual German POWs (10m41s).
• The Ritchie Boys were trained by instructors such as Frank Levit, a World War I veteran and pro wrestling star, who taught them physical combat training with a stick (10m36s).
• By the spring of 1944, the Ritchie Boys were ready to return to Western Europe as naturalized Americans in American uniforms, but they knew that if they were captured, the Nazis would treat them harshly, especially if they were identified as Jewish (11m14s).
• Some of the Ritchie Boys requested new dog tags that did not identify them as Jewish, as they knew that contact with Germans might not be pleasant (11m30s).

D-Day and the Ritchie Boys' Role

• On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched a massive military operation on D-Day, and the Ritchie Boys were attached to different Army units to provide battlefield intelligence (11m55s).
• Victor Brombert was with the first American armor division to land on Omaha Beach, where he experienced immense debris, wounded people, and dead people, and was haunted by the experience (12m48s).
• The Ritchie Boys played a pivotal role in providing battlefield intelligence that helped the Allies in the war, which was intensely personal for them as they were fighting against the Nazis who had persecuted their families (13m39s).
• The Richie boys landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and helped liberate Paris, crossing into Germany with the Allied armies and witnessing the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, all while tracking down evidence and interrogating Nazi criminals later tried at Nuremberg (13m52s).

Liberation and the Aftermath

• Some Richie boys, like Guy Stern, learned what had happened to the families they left behind while in Europe (14m9s).
• By the summer of 1944, German troops in Normandy were outnumbered and overpowered, and the Allies liberated Paris on August 25th, driving Nazi troops out of France (14m21s).

The Battle of the Bulge and Interrogation Tactics

• Hitler was determined to continue the war, and in the Ardennes region of Belgium, the Germans mounted a massive counter-offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge (14m35s).
• Amid the chaos of war, Guy Stern and the other Richie boys had a job to do, embedded in every army unit, interrogating tens of thousands of captured Nazi soldiers and civilians, extracting key strategic information on enemy strength, troop movements, and defensive positions (14m59s).
• The Richie boys relied on their Camp Ritchie training to get people to open up, improvising according to the situation, and using a friendly approach, trying to be human, and giving out cigarettes to build complicity with prisoners (15m55s).
• The Richie boys connected with prisoners on subjects as varied as food and soccer rivalries but also used deception on difficult targets, including using the fear of Russian captivity to extract information (16m57s).
• Guy Stern used a Russian uniform and the pseudonym "Commissar Krov" to intimidate German prisoners, with 80% of them breaking down due to their fear of the Russians (17m21s).

Intelligence Gathering and the "Red Book"

• The Richie boys' subjects ranged from low-level German soldiers to high-ranking Nazi officers, including Hans Geral, brother of Hitler's Chief propagandist Joseph Geral (18m5s).
• Paul Fairbrook helped write the "Red Book," a compact manual outlining the makeup of virtually every Nazi unit, information every Richie boy committed to memory (18m17s).
• The Ritchie Boys were a group of soldiers who earned a reputation for delivering important tactical information quickly, making a major contribution to every battle on the Western Front, with their work being crucial in saving lives (18m56s).
• They were able to gather critical information from captured German prisoners, uniforms, and equipment, which helped identify the location of certain units, weak spots, and strong points (19m21s).

Critical Contributions and Psychological Warfare

• The Ritchie Boys' intelligence work was of critical importance, especially for commanders in the field who might not have had access to such information, and their work helped convince German units to surrender without fighting (19m47s).
• The Ritchie Boys used mobile broadcast units with loudspeakers to persuade German soldiers to surrender, and they also drafted and dropped leaflets from airplanes behind enemy lines (20m20s).
• One of the most effective leaflets was signed by Eisenhower, which carried significant weight with the Germans due to their naive approach to signed and sealed documents (20m48s).

Secret Missions and Risks

• The Ritchie Boys faced threats beyond fighting, including being mistaken for the enemy by their own troops due to their foreign accents, which led to the institution of passwords at checkpoints (21m27s).
• Some Ritchie Boys, like Max Lerner, were recruited for secret missions, such as passing information to French underground resistance groups, and were trained as spies to go behind enemy lines (22m0s).
• Max Lerner, a 97-year-old Austrian Jew, served as a special agent with the counterintelligence corps and was trained to wear civilian clothes, pass messages, and gather information (22m12s).
• Lerner even disguised himself as a German officer and snuck behind enemy lines, taking significant risks to contribute to the war effort (22m42s).

The End of the War and the Discovery of Nazi Atrocities

• Guy Stern, a member of the Ritchie Boys, a secret American intelligence group, recounts his experience of leading a team of American soldiers into a German depot at night to destroy equipment, and expresses that he wasn't aware of the potential consequences of being captured if they were caught (22m46s).
• By the spring of 1945, Allied Forces neared Berlin, and Hitler took his life in his underground bunker, leading to Germany's surrender on May 8th of that year, which Stern remembers feeling elated about (23m3s).
• However, the joy was short-lived as Allied soldiers discovered the full scale of the Nazi mass extermination, and Stern recalls arriving at Buchenwald Concentration Camp three days after its liberation, where he witnessed emaciated and horribly looking people close to death (23m34s).
• Stern returned to his birthplace, Hildesheim, hoping to reunite with his family, but found the town in ruins, and a childhood friend informed him that his parents, younger brother, and sister had been forced from their home and deported, and were killed either in Warsaw or Auschwitz (24m27s).
• Stern reflects on why he was the only one in his family to survive, and attributes it to a driving force in his life to show that he was worthy of being saved, and to honor his family that perished (24m52s).

Post-War Assignments and the Pursuit of Justice

• The Ritchie Boys, a group of American soldiers with mastery of the German language and culture, played a critical role in the Allies' victory over Hitler, and many of them, including Stern, were Jewish refugees from Europe who fled their homeland and joined the US Army (25m37s).
• After Hitler's defeat, many Ritchie Boys took on a new assignment to find and arrest top Nazi war criminals using their language and interrogation skills (25m53s).
• Stern believes that the greatest contribution of the Ritchie Boys was the continuous flow of reliable information that helped expedite the end of the war (26m5s).
• Victor Brombert, a longtime Yale and Princeton Professor, helped enact the official Allied policy of removing Nazi influence from German public life, known as denazification, and was assigned to the denotification process in May 1945, which involved arresting important Nazi officials (27m24s).
• The Ritchie Boys led German citizens on tours of concentration camps to educate them about the atrocities committed by Hitler, and sometimes entire towns were forced to pay respects to the dead (28m27s).
• Max Lerner was assigned to interview German civilians to gauge their involvement with the Nazi cause and determine which ones should be punished, but many claimed they were forced to participate and denied being Nazis (28m41s).
• The Ritchie Boys used the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, a book that listed enemy nationals suspected of committing tens of thousands of war crimes, to identify subjects wanted for interrogation (29m29s).
• The book became a sort of "Nazi Hunter Bible" for Allied investigators, including the Ritchie Boys, who used it to track down and prosecute top Nazi officials and low-ranking members of the Armed Forces (29m33s).
• Max Lerner found satisfaction in hunting Nazis, as it allowed him to confront the people responsible for the trauma his family experienced, including his parents who had to leave everything behind and arrive in the United States penniless (29m58s).
• All SS members were subject to automatic arrest, and the Ritchie Boys used a tattoo of the blood group under the left arm to identify SS men, although some had attempted to erase the tattoo (30m30s).
• Max Lerner recalls being in charge of prominent captured German prisoner Julius Streicher, the founder and editor of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer, and making sure he knew that a Jew was controlling him (31m31s).
• Streicher was later tried and convicted at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, where concentration camp survivors testified against their Nazi tormentors, and dozens of Ritchie Boys worked as prosecutors, interrogators, and translators (31m58s).
• The Ritchie Boys collected evidence that led to the prosecution of many high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Wilhelm Keitel, and the evidence relating to war crimes was overwhelming (32m16s).
• Many of the Ritchie Boys' enemies were convicted for their crimes and executed after the war, while the Ritchie Boys themselves were celebrated for their achievements. (32m40s)

Recognition and Reflections

• Guy Stern received several medals for his service, including the Good Conduct Medal, the European Theater of Operations Medal, and the Bronze Star. (32m51s)
• Stern does not consider himself a hero, instead pointing to the American soldiers who took the heights on Omaha Beach as the true heroes. (33m15s)

Diverse Roles and Tragic Fates

• The Ritchie Boys served in various capacities, including in the first wave on D-Day, in POW camps, and in gathering information in the United States. (34m39s)
• Some Ritchie Boys suffered severe fates, including two who were captured at the Battle of the Bulge and executed by the Germans because they were Jewish. (35m2s)
• Captain Kurt Bruns, who ordered the murder of the two Ritchie Boys, was executed by a firing squad in June 1945. (35m17s)

Documenting German Operations and Shaping History

• After the war, the Ritchie Boys continued their work, including setting up the German military documents section at Camp Ritchie, which cataloged over 20,000 captured German documents. (35m30s)
• The project detailed every aspect of the German Army's operations during the war and was used by the US war department to study Germany's battles with the Soviets on the Eastern front. (35m58s)
• The Ritchie Boys' work had a significant impact on the war and beyond, including shaping the Cold War era and contributing to the study of war crimes. (36m21s)

Successful Careers and Notable Ritchie Boys

• Many of the Ritchie Boys went on to successful careers, including Guy Stern, Victor Brombert, Paul Fairbrook, and Max Lehrer, who all attended Ivy League schools on the GI Bill. (36m36s)
• Other notable Ritchie Boys include author JD Salinger, Archibald Roosevelt, and philanthropist Edgar Bronfman. (37m1s)
• Many Ritchie Boys went on to become ambassadors, while others made significant contributions to American science, with over 250 continuing to work in the field of intelligence after the war, becoming professional spies (37m24s).
• Some of those who trained at Camp Ritchie went on to join the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, playing a significant role in setting up the agency (37m36s).

Unsung Heroes and a Legacy Revealed

• The Ritchie Boys are considered true heroes, making massive contributions and helping shape what it means to be American, with some giving their lives in service to the country (37m57s).
• The story of the Ritchie Boys is not well-known among Americans because much of the information was kept secret until the 1990s, and the methods used are still important to keep secret (38m16s).
• In the early 2000s, reunions of the Ritchie Boys began, with the now elderly veterans swapping stories about their experiences and reflecting on their time in the war (38m30s).
• When the Ritchie Boys reunite, they often share anecdotes and reflect on their experiences with a deep sense of pride, feeling proud to have been part of the American Army and to have contributed to the war effort (38m55s).
• One veteran expressed that being a Ritchie Boy gave him the opportunity to help fight and win the war, and that he feels he has earned the right to be an American (39m25s).
• The Ritchie Boys' story is now being told, with the veterans finally sharing their experiences and the significant role they played in American history (38m45s).