Not usually moved by the content of 60 Minutes, but was fascinated by “The Ritchie Boys”, shown tonight, a group of a few hundred soldiers embedded in US WW2 army units who went through training in Maryland - and played important roles in interrogation and strategy, liberating concentration camps, working in paralegal roles after the War - and beyond. Many went on to become scholars and intelligence officers. With July 4th coming tomorrow, I wish to offer them my personal thanks for their service to America and beyond. To Americans here, I wish you a pleasant holiday. Thank you for being at the SDMB.
Is everything in the documentary true? That it involved Roosevelts, great scientists, Salinger, Rockefellers?
A fascinating story. Why is it not better known? They didn’t really start reuniting until the early 2000s when most in their 80s or 90s?
My father was an intelligence officer in WWII. He landed on the day after D-Day to man a radio monitoring station that he received some decoration for. He was born in the US shortly after my grandparents arrived here, they were not German but German and Yiddish were the family languages, my father didn’t even learn English until he went to school, nothing unusual in NYC in the 1920s. Much of his work in the military involved interrogations and translating radio broadcasts. He must have had some contact with the Ritchie Boys but he never talked about his war experiences much.
There was another camp called Fort Hunt (code name P. O. Box 1142) that was kind of a Club Fed for Nazis. Most of the translators were Jewish enlisted soldiers and forced to act as valets for a bunch of indulged Nazis (many of whom were prominent rocket scientists) who had access to tennis courts and a swimming pool. The camp’s CO would make the translators take the Nazis on shopping trips so they could buy stockings and chocolate for their wives. In the documentary I saw, many of the translators were still quite bitter about the experience 50 or more years later.
Riiight. Which prominent German physicists, exactly, chose to emigrate and could master space mechanics but not such simple phrases? And people do understand what it was that hastened the end of the war… the discovery of animation.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. These were Nazi POWs: not willing emigrants. And they were pampered for their cooperation; a strategy that paid off but was galling for those who had to do the pampering. The reason the doc is mostly animated is because the program was top secret for 50 years and little or no film exists; just the accounts of the translators and guards who were required to be silent for half a century.
Lots of Americans speak German. You are suggesting these prisoners had useful skills and knowledge but were so untrusted they preferred to use translators with personal loyalties? Strange. But a lot of strange stories in that conflict. Never heard this story.
No. The translators were German-American servicemen, most of whom were Jewish. For obvious reasons they hated the Nazis and were happy when told they would be interrogating them. Alas, the techniques used were a lot kinder than the recruited translators would have preferred.