The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler
The story of young German Jews who escaped the Nazis, most often without their families, only to return a few years later to war-torn Europe as members of an elite secret U.S. Army unit.The young men who would become known as “The Ritchie Boys” arrived in America as “enemy aliens,” and although they were allowed to enlist in the U.S. military, they were distrusted by everyone. So, in effect, they became outsiders all over again. Until one day in 1942, when the Pentagon woke up to the incredible asset they had on their hands. These men knew the language, culture and psychology of the enemy better than any Americans and had the greatest motivation to fight Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime. The Pentagon came up with a top-secret plan to harness their expertise by training them in the art of prisoner interrogation. And so off they were sent, back into the belly of the beast, Jews returning to Nazi Germany to occupy the very front lines of battlefields across Europe. Many of them re-entered Europe on D-Day. Their mission, to extract vital intel from freshly-captured POWs about troop movements and command structures and so on, was hugely successful and provided key information that led to victory by the Allied forces.Meanwhile, few of these men knew what had happened to the families they left behind in Germany, families who had sacrificed to send them on to the safety of America. As the intelligence they gathered revealed increasingly horrific details about the Holocaust (most of which was only then beginning to come to light), they came to fear – and, in many cases, discovered – that the worst had befallen their own fathers and mothers and siblings.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Previously published as Sons and Soldiers
First published in the United States by William Morrow in 2017
Copyright © Bruce Henderson 2017
Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
Bruce Henderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008180478
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008180492 Version: 2018-04-20
For them all
Contents
About the Publisher
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he declared war on his country’s half million Jewish citizens. They were stripped of their most basic rights. Judaism was defined as a race, not a religion, and Jews were excluded from German citizenship. Restrictive edicts put in place by the Nazis affected Jews of all ages and in all walks of life, and even Jewish children were forced out of public schools. A harsh reality for German Jews was the growing realization that neither they nor their children had a future in the country. This fear culminated in November 1938 with Kristallnacht, known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were ransacked by Nazis. Nearly a hundred Jews were killed that night, and up to thirty thousand were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them died within weeks of their arrival. Though by then tens of thousands of German Jews had already immigrated to the United States, this was the final confirmation anyone required that Germany was no longer safe for Jews.
But departing meant leaving behind their ancestral home, relatives, friends, and life savings, and there was no guarantee they would be able to get past restrictive U.S. immigration quotas, and those in other countries, which made it difficult for more Jews to immigrate.
It was often impossible for an entire family to get out of Germany, and many faced an excruciating decision of splitting up, perhaps forever, when parents discovered they could get only one child, under age sixteen, to safety through the efforts of Jewish relief organizations in America and England. Who went and who stayed often meant the difference between life and death. By the time Germany went to war with the United States in 1941, the Nazis’ determination to create an Aryan Germany had switched from a policy of forced Jewish emigration to one of mass annihilation of those Jews still in the country and the millions of other Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied territories, solving what Hitler called the “Jewish problem.”
Many parents chose to send away their eldest sons so they might carry on the family name. Throughout Germany, there were heartbreaking farewells at railway stations and seaports where mothers and fathers said good-bye to their sons. Those German Jewish boys who arrived in America in the 1930s without their parents or siblings had to adapt to life in a new land on their own. Placed in the homes of distant relatives or foster families, they enrolled in public schools and immersed themselves in a language, culture, and world unfamiliar to them. But with the help of dedicated teachers and new friends, they quickly became Americanized, although still carrying the telltale accents from their homelands.
Yet they were served well by the Old World values instilled in them by their parents, emphasizing education and hard work. By the time the United States entered the war, these beloved sons who had been sent to America by their desperate families were stalwart young men who loved everything about U.S. democracy and freedom. They were also eager to return to Europe with the U.S. military to fight Hitler, not only out of patriotism for their new country, but their own personal vendetta as well. Unlike many other victims of the Nazis, the German Jewish refugees who became American soldiers had a means to help destroy the regime that had persecuted them and their families.
