▶ Watch Video: The start of WWII for two of the Ritchie Boys
Guy Stern is 99 years old. The German-born Jew escaped his homeland in 1937, leaving behind his parents and two siblings. He arrived in the U.S. alone at age 15. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stern raced to enlist, eager to return to Germany to fight the Nazis.
Paul Fairbrook, 97, had the same impulse. Fairbrook, another German Jew, made it to the U.S. in 1938, leaving behind aunts, uncles and cousins who were later murdered by the Nazis.
Stern and Fairbrook joined the U.S. Army and were recruited to train at a secret military intelligence center, based in Maryland, known as Camp Ritchie. The men who trained there became known as the Ritchie Boys; they are credited with providing combat intelligence that was pivotal to the Allies’ success in the war. Their work was shrouded in secrecy and many of them didn’t publicly discuss their experience at Camp Ritchie for decades. Jon Wertheim talks to three of the surviving Ritchie Boys on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, May 9 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Stern, Fairbrook, and another Ritchie Boy who Wertheim speaks to, Victor Brombert, 97, were recruited to the new military intelligence training center based on their knowledge of German language and culture and their high IQs. In the secret camp, they trained in espionage and battlefield interrogation. They learned how to be effective interrogators of prisoners and civilians so they could glean crucial combat intelligence on the frontlines. Ritchie Boys like Fairbrook were extremely motivated to return to Germany and defeat the Nazis.
“Look I’m a German Jew. And there’s nothing that I wanted more [than]to get some revenge on Hitler who killed my uncles, and my aunts and my cousins and there was no question in my mind, and neither of all the men in Camp Ritchie. So many of them were Jewish. We were all on the same wavelength,” Fairbrook tells Wertheim. ”We were delighted to get a chance to do something for the United States.”
Stern says he was focused on doing his duty as a U.S. soldier no matter the danger.
“I was a soldier doing my job and that precluded any concern that I was going back to a country I once was very attached to,” Stern tells 60 Minutes. “I had a war to fight and I did it. ”
They knew what would happen to them if they were captured by the Germans. Stern asked that his dog tag not identify him as “Hebrew.” ”Because I knew that the contact with Germans might not be very nice,” he says.
The Ritchie Boys fought on the frontlines from Normandy onwards, collecting key tactical intelligence, interrogating tens of thousands of prisoners and civilians. Their foreign accents sometimes put them in particular danger.
Brombert tells Wertheim, ”What happened to one of the Ritchie Boys at night on the way to the latrine, he was asked for a password and he gave the name…but with a German accent. He was shot right away and killed.”
Brombert says being mistaken for the enemy was always a source of concern. ”You know, I don’t talk like an Alabama person or a Texan,” he says.
The Ritchie Boys’ work did not end when Germany surrendered in May 1945. They helped liberate the concentration camps and witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Nazi mass extermination of Jews.
Stern remembers arriving at Buchenwald concentration camp with a fellow American sergeant.
“We were walking along and you saw these emaciated, horribly looking, close-to-death people,” recalls Stern. “And so, I fell back behind because I didn’t want to be seen crying to a hardened soldier and then he looked around to look where I was… and he, this good fellow from the middle of Ohio, was bawling just as I was.”
David Frey, a professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, says the Ritchie Boys, made a massive contribution to the Allied victory by extracting key strategic information on enemy strength, troop movements and defensive positions.
“They were incredibly effective. Sixty-plus percent of the actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield was gathered by Ritchie Boys… a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought - the entire sets of battles on the Western Front,” says Frey.
The Ritchie boys also tracked down evidence and interrogated Nazi war criminals who were later tried at Nuremberg.
“They were critical in terms of arresting… some of the major figures and gathering the evidence for Nuremberg, then shaping the Cold War era, they really played a significant role,” Frey says. ”In fact, some of them were trained as spies and some of them went on to careers as spies.”