I was surprised to see a recent “60 Minutes” segment about the secret World War II military intelligence training camp at Fort Ritchie in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ritchie Boys, like 97-year-old Victor Brombert, had never been featured on prime time TV. The secrecy of their service and mission has been given little publicity, even after 75 years. My father never spoke of being a Ritchie Boy until I became the community and media liaison for the Tulsa Jewish Federation shortly after the Oklahoma City neo-Nazi bombing.
One of the stories my father told me was about being in a parking lot outside a restaurant in Paris with one of his soldier buddies. The Nazis dropped a bomb on the restaurant and killed his friend, leaving my dad still standing. I commemorate this anonymous friend every Memorial Day and know that it could easily have been my dad’s life that was taken. But he lived to excel at what he was trained to do.
Who were the Ritchie Boys? Many were German Jews whose families had escaped Germany and come to America. They were well-educated intellectuals trained to fight. One Ritchie Boy, Victor Bromberg, spoke on “60 Minutes” about being trained to spar in fake German towns with imported prisoners of war.
But fighting wasn’t their mission. Speaking German and knowing the culture, they were naturals at front-line interrogations, getting information from villagers and serving as spies. Despite knowing that if captured, they’d be treated viscously by Nazi troops, they accounted for 60% of the information gathered on European troop deployment, arms locations and bombing plans.
Doing interrogations, my dad entered several of the death camps used to annihilate millions of Jews, gays, gypsies and resisters of Hitler’s reign. He described the rank smell of hundreds of decaying bodies stacked up like lumber in an underground passageway. While the victims weren’t U.S. soldiers, I honor their memory, too, since many have no one left to remember them.