When American soldiers fought Germany in World War II, there was one group that was particularly motivated – about 2,000 Jewish refugees, mostly Germans and Austrians, who fled the Nazis and then returned to Europe to confront their executioners as members of US military intelligence.
The so-called Ritchie Boys were among approximately 15,000 graduates of training programs at Camp Ritchie, a former Maryland National Guard camp named for late Maryland Governor Albert C. Ritchie. Many German and Austrian Jewish refugees showed up at Camp Ritchie while still designated as “enemy aliens”. In return for their knowledge of German language, culture, and topography, which proved essential in extracting information vital to the war effort, the military offered citizenship.
“The Ritchie Boys were one of the greatest secret weapons of WWII for US Army intelligence,” said Stuart E. Eizenstat, shortly before becoming president of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2022. , when the museum awarded the Ritchie Boys the Elie Wiesel. Prize, his highest honour. “Many had fled Nazi Germany but returned as American soldiers, deploying their knowledge of German language and culture to great advantage. They contributed significantly to the war effort and saved lives .
The Ritchie Boys served on the front line
The Ritchie Boys, some of whom landed on the beaches of Normandy, helped interpret documents and gather intelligence, and waged enemy warfare. The divisions that liberated the concentration camps included hundreds of Ritchie Boys, who interrogated survivors. According to the Holocaust Museum, two Jewish soldiers were captured and executed after being identified as Jews of German descent, and there were around 200 Ritchie Boys alive as of May 2022.
Investment banker David Rockefeller and civil rights activist William Sloane Coffin were among the Ritchie Boys, who were assigned to every Army and Marine unit, as well as the Office of Strategic Services and the Counter Intelligence Corps .
Although members of the Ritchie Boys received over 65 Silver Stars, their group was not well known during the war. This changed over the years as the Ritchie Boys began to receive more recognition. In addition to the Holocaust Museum award, the US Senate passed a resolution in 2021 honoring “the bravery and dedication of the Ritchie Boys” and recognizing “the significance of their contributions to the success of the Allied Forces during World War II. “.
David S. Frey, professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide at the United States Military Academy, said that in the late 1930s General George Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the army, realized that if the United States was going to war, he needed a battlefield intelligence capability – which his army lacked.
“In the era of mechanized warfare, you have to know what these large armies look like, what their capabilities are, how they are deployed,” Frey explains. “So to get that kind of information, especially the kind of information that you capture on the battlefield, you need people who are trained to get that information. To do that, they’ve learned photo analysis, terrain analysis, aerial reconnaissance, enemy army analysis, interrogation, signals intelligence and much more.
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The Ritchie Boys spoke several languages
The Ritchie Boys were born out of this need, and so the United States recruited foreign language speakers for military intelligence. Many were foreign-born or had lived abroad for long periods of time, and the group included a large number of first- or second-generation Americans who still spoke German or other languages at home, Frey said.
“There were at least 30 languages spoken at Camp Ritchie, but obviously the preference was for German speakers because most of the enemy forces would be German,” says Frey.
He added that the military picks smart people “because they have to process a huge amount of information.” Some of these books, Frey says, were nearly 500 pages by the end of the war.
“After the war,” says Frey, “a survey of battalion commanders concluded that intelligence gathered by Camp Ritchie graduates was responsible for at least 60 percent of actionable intelligence for the Western Front Theater.”
Many have faced anti-Semitism while serving
Some have faced anti-Semitism from their fellow soldiers. “Most of the guys in basic training were Southerners who hated Jewish boys from New York and broke our chops most of the time,” said George Sakheim, who had fled to the United States via Palestine, in POLITICO magazine.
Many Jewish refugees lost family members and when the war ended they sought them out.
“Some of them were very involved in gathering information that became the basis of the Nuremberg trials and subsequent war crimes trials,” Frey said.
Beginning in September 1944, the U.S. Army trained Japanese Americans at Camp Ritchie, and their language skills were also used in the war effort, this time against Japan. Frey noted similarities between Jewish refugees – who were considered enemy aliens until mid-1942 because they came from countries with which the United States was at war – and Japanese Americans who had been interned.
“It’s not just a story of Jewish émigrés,” Frey says, “it’s also a story of what I would call fringe soldiers and their defense of this country.”
