The Ritchie Boys<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It focused on the former Camp Ritchie, Maryland, an elite military intelligence school during the Second World War, and on four very old survivors from among those who were trained there.\u00a0 All four of them, as it happened, were German refugee Jews, whose language skills and cultural background made them highly useful to the U.S. military.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
My Dad, too, was a \u201cRitchie Boy,\u201d but he never made a big deal of it. \u00a0He mentioned his having been at Camp Ritchie occasionally, but I never appreciated what a remarkable place it was until after he passed away.\u00a0 (My wife and I have visited it since; it\u2019s no longer called \u201cCamp Ritchie.\u201d)\u00a0 I have so many questions that I would like to ask him now!<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
There were several things in the 60 Minutes<\/em> program that helped me to make sense of bits and pieces of my father\u2019s life. \u00a0I know that he was involved in interrogating German prisoners of war.\u00a0 That was a Ritchie Boy specialty.\u00a0 I also know that, just as was mentioned for other Ritchie Boys in the 60 Minutes<\/i> piece, he guided local people through the liberated camp at Mauthausen.\u00a0 They professed to have never suspected anything and to have known nothing at all about what was happening to the inmates there.\u00a0 Dad wasn\u2019t persuaded.\u00a0 Some of them complained that the Mauthausen inmates whom the United States had liberated had stolen cabbages and other vegetables from their house gardens.\u00a0 The Army didn\u2019t have food enough to feed all of the emaciated and starving captives or personnel enough to deal with them (and had found that, in some cases, if they fed them they killed them).\u00a0 So they gave them a bit of food and told them to go home if they could and to forage where they were able.\u00a0 Complaints from the locals about stolen produce didn\u2019t gain a lot of sympathy from the American soldiers after they had seen the horrors of the extermination camp.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I also knew that my father had taken photographs of Mauthausen immediately after the liberation \u2014 <\/span>terrible<\/i> photographs, which I still possess \u2014 and that he had posted them in front of the then city hall in Linz, Austria, under the banner \u201cNazi Kultur.\u201d\u00a0 He remembered hearing people passing by, gazing at his photos, and saying \u201cDas habe ich nie gewusst!\u201d\u00a0 (\u201cI never knew that!\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had always wondered why he took so many photographs, and whether he had simply had free time to wander about, after liberation, snapping souvenir photos at his own initiative.\u00a0 I now see that posting such photos in prominent places was something that many<\/em> \u201cRitchie Boys\u201d did in areas near liberated Nazi death camps.\u00a0 It was part of the Army\u2019s postwar effort at \u201cde-Nazification.\u201d\u00a0 And we still own his personal copy of the German Order of Battle<\/em>, a large and detailed book-length list of German military units, commanders, weapons, and so forth.\u00a0 Another copy, belonging to one of the interviewees, was shown during the 60 Minutes<\/i> program.\u00a0 The Ritchie Boys were expected to memorize it.\u00a0 Again, the artifact was much more significant than I had realized.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s principal activity, though, was aerial photo reconnaissance interpretation, which was also mentioned in the CBS program as part of the Ritchie program.\u00a0 He did it while based at High Wycombe, roughly midway between London and Oxford, and then, arriving shortly after D-Day, on the European continent.\u00a0 He served, too, in some capacity for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was dissolved a month after the end of the war and which was eventually replaced, in a sense, by the Central Intelligence Agency. \u00a0But he never told me much about his involvement with the OSS, except that one of the things that he was asked to do was to keep an eye out for Nazi or pro-German sympathies among the men of the Eleventh Armored Division.\u00a0 He was obliged to file weekly reports with somebody at OSS, but I\u2019m not sure what they covered.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
My Dad was not fluent in German, though he had more than a little bit of the language and was sent by the Army to study German for a time at the University of Chicago.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember much of what he said about that period, except for one story (which I\u2019ll tell presently) and the fact that he walked every day by the bleachers of Stagg Field, where a major portion of the Manhattan Project was housed, and where Enrico Fermi achieved the first sustained man-made nuclear fission reaction.\u00a0 As I recall, Dad said that they could tell that something important was going on, but that it was impossible to see what it was.\u00a0 Now here\u2019s the story:<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the beginning of each class, the instructor would summon the members of the class to attention by calling out \u201cMeine Herren!\u201d\u00a0 (literally, \u201cMy Lords!\u201d or \u201cMy Masters!\u201d but, really, just \u201cGentlemen!\u201d).\u00a0 In the back of the room sat an Army officer who knew no German and wasn\u2019t a student but whose task was, simply, to make sure that the men on his list showed up for class and didn\u2019t play hooky.\u00a0 After a week or two and several repetitions of \u201cMeine Herren!\u201d he stood up rather angrily one day to demand \u201cWhere the hell is Monahan?\u201d\u00a0 He heard the German Meine Herren<\/em> as Monahan<\/em>, and plainly assumed that there was some soldier named Monahan<\/em> who wasn\u2019t on his list but who was skipping class.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although my father lacked native or even fluent German, he had been raised in a predominantly Scandinavian-immigrant community in North Dakota, born to a Danish-American father who had come over as a baby and to a Norwegian-born mother who had arrived in the United States at, I think, the age of eighteen. \u00a0Accordingly, he knew some Norwegian and was comfortable with Scandinavian ways. \u00a0I wonder whether that fact played a role in his selection for Camp Ritchie, along with his high IQ, whatever it was. \u00a0(I recall his telling me that he was dispatched to Ritchie shortly after taking an Army IQ test.) \u00a0Perhaps, under slightly different circumstances, he might have been assigned to Norway. \u00a0As it was, he was eventually delegated to Patton\u2019s Third Army.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The CBS program focused on German-born Jewish refugees among the Ritchie Boys.\u00a0 At least three of the four that they interviewed, all of them in their late nineties by the time of their interviews, had gone into more or less academic careers:\u00a0 One of them had served as the dean of the Culinary School of America.\u00a0 One had taught Romance languages and literature at both Yale and Princeton, and the third had attended an Ivy League school and then worked as a professor somewhere for several decades.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I can understand easily enough, I think, why Hugh Nibley was chosen for Camp Ritchie.\u00a0 (He, too, was a Ritchie Boy.)\u00a0 Hugh was manifestly a person of extraordinarily high intelligence. \u00a0He already had his Ph.D. by 1938.\u00a0 And, having served a mission in Germany, he was fluent in the language. \u00a0My Dad, though, grew up on an isolated North Dakota farm \u2014 after visiting there this past summer, I have a much better feeling for just how isolated it was! \u2014 and, constrained by the Depression and without any money, had only earned an associate\u2019s degree from Pierce College in Los Angeles after a year or so at the North Dakota School of Forestry.\u00a0 Thereafter, he had to make his living as a construction worker and had done a stint with Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps.\u00a0 Then, during the year or so before Pearl Harbor, he had joined the Army, where he was assigned to, of all things, the horse cavalry \u2014 yes, the horse cavalry still existed at that point \u2014 patrolling the border between the United States and Mexico from a base located near El Centro, California. \u00a060 Minutes<\/em> described Camp Ritchie as a group of \u201cintellectuals.\u201d\u00a0 I begin to appreciate what a tribute to my father it was that, given his humble background, the Army deemed him worthy of a place among such talented and well-credentialed men.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
How I miss him.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Last night, we watched a special piece from the CBS 60 Minutes program that was first broadcast on Sunday evening.\u00a0 It was entitled The Ritchie Boys.\u00a0 It focused on the former Camp Ritchie, Maryland, an elite military intelligence school during the Second World War, and on four very old survivors from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27330,15568,16346,27327,24352,24355,16355,2253,6102,19412,677,2935,2938,1582,3856,24349,1911,14023,27324,5526,27108,5529,5532],"class_list":["post-93786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-60-minutes","tag-army","tag-camp-ritchie","tag-cbs","tag-exile","tag-exiles","tag-fort-ritchie","tag-german","tag-hugh-nibley","tag-hugh-w-nibley","tag-intelligence","tag-jew","tag-jewish","tag-jews","tag-nibley","tag-refugee","tag-refugees","tag-ritchie","tag-ritchie-boys","tag-second-world-war","tag-world-war-2","tag-world-war-ii","tag-world-war-two"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Dad](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-30-at-9.03.27-PM.png\")
<\/a>