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and I said "may I know where I'm going?" and he said "no, military secret." Guy Stern: I was called to the company office and told you're shipping out. Jon Wertheim: How did you find out you were going to go to Camp Ritchie? You really have to understand it helps to have been born in Germany in order to – in order to do a good job.īoth refugees like Fairbrook and Stern, as well as a number of American-born recruits with requisite language skills - were drafted into the Army and sent to Camp Ritchie. You really know an awful lot of the subtleties when you're having a conversation with another German and we were able to find out things in their answers that enabled us to ask more questions.
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That is the key to being a good interrogator. Paul Fairbrook: Oh that is a very good question. Jon Wertheim: Was it your knowledge of the language or your knowledge of the psychology and the German culture? And that's what the key to the success was Paul Fairbrook: You can learn to shoot a rifle in six months but you can't learn fluent German in six months. Paul Fairbrook: Well, because it was an unusual part of the United States Army. Jon Wertheim: Why were the Ritchie Boys so successful? But within a few months the government realized these so-called enemy aliens could be a valuable resource in the war.
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We were delighted to get a chance to do something for the United States.Īt the time though, the military wouldn't take volunteers who weren't born in the U.S. And there's nothing that I wanted more is 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. Jon Wertheim: Why did you want to enlist initially? His Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when he was 10. Now 98, Fairbrook is the former dean of the Culinary Institute of America. In New York, Paul Fairbrook, had a similar impulse. Personal, of course, but also this country - I was really treated well. Guy Stern: I had an immediate visceral response to that and that was this is my war for many reasons. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stern, by then a college student, raced to enlist. alone at age 15, settling with an uncle in St. 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. Starting in 1942, more than 11,000 soldiers went through the rigorous training at what was the army's first centralized school for intelligence and psychological warfare.ĭavid Frey: The purpose of the facility was to train interrogators. They took their name from the place they trained - Camp Ritchie, Maryland – a secret American military intelligence center during the war. He is among the last surviving Ritchie Boys - a group of young men – many of them German Jews – who played an outsized role in helping the Allies win World War II. And there's nothing that forges unity better than having a common enemy.This is Guy Stern 80 years ago. Jon Wertheim: All in service of winning the war?ĭavid Frey: All in service of winning the war. You had people coming from all over uniting for a particular cause. The largest set of graduates were 2,000 German-born Jews.ĭavid Frey: If we take Camp Ritchie in microcosm, it was almost the ideal of an American melting pot. Recruits were chosen based on their knowledge of European language and culture, as well as their high IQs. Guy Stern: Well I think not (laugh) but I don't run as fast, I don't swim as fast but I feel happy with my tasks.ĭavid Frey: They made a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought - the entire sets of battles on the Western Front.
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Jon Wertheim: You work 6 days a week, you swim every morning, you lecture, any signs of slowing down? Fortunately, some of the Ritchie Boys are still around to tell their tales, and that includes Guy Stern, age 100. For decades, they didn't discuss their work. And incredibly, they were responsible for most of the combat intelligence gathered on the Western Front. The Ritchie Boys, as they were known, trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. Their mission: to use their knowledge of the German language and culture to return to Europe and fight Naziism. What's most extraordinary about this group: many of them were German-born Jews who fled their homeland, came to America, and then joined the U.S. Last year, we introduced you to members of a secret American intelligence unit who fought in World War II. For as casually as we often toss around the word "hero", sometimes no lesser term applies.