Sons and Soldiers Read online

  Dedication

  For them all

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue: Germany 1938

  PART ONE 1. Saving the Children

  2. Escaping the Nazis

  3. A Place to Call Home

  PART TWO 4. Camp Ritchie

  5. Going Back

  6. Normandy

  7. The Breakout

  8. Holland

  9. The Forests

  10. Return to Deutschland

  PART THREE 11. The Camps

  12. Denazification

  13. Going Home

  Dramatis Personae

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Appendix: The Ritchie Boys

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Bruce Henderson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  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 heart-breaking 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.

  But there was a snag. When Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, German citizens residing in America were automatically declared “enemy aliens.” Even after Congress passed legislation allowing enemy aliens to be inducted into the army, some found themselves assigned to U.S. bases where they were mistrusted and their accents ridiculed by other GIs.

  War planners in the Pentagon soon realized that the German Jews already in uniform knew the language, culture, and psychology of the enemy best and had the greatest motivation to defeat Hitler. By mid-1942, the army began molding them into a top secret, decisive force to help win the war in Europe. Over the next three years, thirty-one eight-week sessions were held at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, consisting of extensive classroom work and field training. The largest group of graduates was 1,985 German-born Jews trained to interrogate German POWs. They were fast-tracked for U.S. citizenship and sent overseas with all the frontline units fighting the Germans. The Ritchie Boys, as they came to be known, had no idea what they would find when they returned to Europe. Many still did not know what had happened to their families that had sent them away to safety in America.

  Sons and Soldiers follows a group of Ritchie Boys from their boyhoods in Germany, to their escapes to America, to their return to Europe as U.S. soldiers to fight in a war that for them was intensely personal. They parachuted with the airborne forces on D-Day, landed at Omaha Beach, raced with Patton’s tanks across occupied France, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last desperate gamble to win the war. They then crossed into Germany with the Allied armies and were with the forces that entered the Nazi concentration camps, where they saw with their own eyes the horrors of the Holocaust. When the shooting finally ended, it was time for these sons to look for the families they had left behind.

  To this day, the exploits and strategic importance of the Ritchie Boys are little known. They took part in every major battle and campaign of the war in Europe, collecting valuable tactical intelligence about enemy strength, troop movements, and defensive positions as well as enemy morale. In the course of the war, tens of thousands of newly captured Third Reich soldiers were interrogated by teams of these German Jewish soldiers. A classified postwar report by the army found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from Ritchie Boys. Yet there has been no publication of their operations or a complete roster of these men made public. As members of Military Intelligence, they were warned not to reveal their branch of the service or their training or duties during the war, and similar restrictions applied postwar to any documents, reports, or notes they may have retained. They held no reunions and were disinclined to join veterans’ organizations, as their German accents made them unwelcome in the usual circles of U.S. veterans. Their story is one of the last great untold sagas of World War II.

  I am honored to tell the true story of these little-known heroes.

  Bruce Henderson

  Menlo Park, California

  Prologue

  GERMANY 1938

  Loud banging at the front door jolted Martin Selling out of a sound sleep. It was shortly before sunrise, November 10, 1938.

  Martin lived in Lehrberg, in southeast Germany; he and his relatives were the only Jews living among the thousand other residents of this tranquil agricultural village. Over the course of the previous day, the Nazis had carried out a series of brutal, coordinated attacks against Jews across Germany. But Martin wasn’t aware of that yet.

  This widespread campaign of malevolence would forever become known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of B
roken Glass,” so called because of the mounds of glass shards from broken windows that littered the streets after thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and hospitals were looted and destroyed. The violence began after a teenage boy in Paris fatally shot a German embassy official—an act of retaliation, as his parents had been expelled from Germany, along with thousands of other Polish Jewish immigrants. Using the shooting in Paris as a pretext for a long-planned roundup of Jews, Nazi storm troopers took to the streets on the night of November 9.

  Twenty-year-old Martin had recently returned to Lehrberg, his childhood home, from Munich, where he had been working as a tailor. Munich was the city in which Hitler rose to power and the national headquarters of the Nazi Party. Martin had seen Hitler numerous times; when his motorcade sped through the streets, everyone on the sidewalks was expected to stand at attention and snap a stiff right arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute. If Martin heard the Führer’s motorcade approaching, or even saw groups of marchers waving Nazi flags, he tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, slipping away or ducking into a side alley.

  Earlier that year, Hitler had become aware that his motorcade regularly passed a large synagogue on its way to party headquarters. On the Führer’s orders, the congregation was given less than a day to remove its books and valuables; a few days later, the site was a newly paved parking lot. Martin’s boss, an older Jew, had finally seen enough. He fled to Italy, leaving Martin jobless and with no choice but to return home to Lehrberg.

  The pounding on the front door did not stop but became louder and more menacing. By the time Martin reached the door it was in danger of being kicked in. He opened it to four storm troopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA), in matching brown shirts with red and black swastika armbands, who pushed him aside and rushed in, though at six foot two Martin towered over them.

  Without giving a reason, the SA men searched the house—helping themselves to an expensive camera—then took Martin into custody along with his uncle, Julius Laub, who had been managing the family’s textile store next door since his sister, Ida—Martin’s widowed mother—passed away two years before. She had run the store following the death of Martin’s father from a heart attack fifteen years earlier. The SA men also arrested the housekeeper, the only other resident in the house. At the same time, other SA men were picking up Martin’s aunt Gitta and her three children, who lived nearby.

  They were all driven five miles to an outdoor sports arena in the town of Ansbach, where they joined sixty other Jewish men, women, and children. The terrified group huddled in the bleachers for the rest of the icy night, shivering from fear and the chill of the blustery winds. Conversing softly with the others, Martin learned that the synagogue in Ansbach had been set ablaze, local Jewish homes vandalized, and Jewish men beaten. When Martin and some others asked the SA men what was going to happen next, they didn’t seem to know. They had only been ordered to arrest all the local Jews.

  The following afternoon, at about 3 P.M., the women and children, as well as men over the age of fifty-five, were released without explanation. Martin, his uncle, and about fifteen other men remained in custody. They were marched to the local prison, an old, primitive structure, and locked up in a single cell. There was no running water or toilet—only a metal “honey bucket”—and the food was primitive and scarce. After two days in these cramped quarters, they were sent to Nuremberg, thirty miles away.

  The Nuremberg district prison was filled nearly to capacity. Several hundred Sudeten Germans, ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, had also been arrested after raising opposition to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, where three million ethnic Germans lived, two months earlier. The local Jews picked up during Kristallnacht—about a hundred in total from Nuremberg—were locked inside the prison gym, which had been furnished only with bare mattresses on the floor. Martin’s group joined them.

  Most of the guards were older men accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals, not political prisoners, and they seemed overwhelmed by the crowded conditions. They did their duty and nothing more, which meant the prisoners were largely left alone. An inmate crew brought food from the kitchen to distribute among the prisoners, and at one point everyone was allowed to take a shower in a communal washroom, which had a row of multiple showerheads. The prisoners were let out of the locked gym in small groups for an hour a day; they could pace circles in the prison yard only after it had been cleared of Aryan prisoners so they would avoid contact with the Jews.

  Within a week, some of the Jewish prisoners were released, Martin’s uncle among them. The decisions about who got out and who did not were utterly mysterious to Martin and everyone else. While some of the guards revealed that they had received the release orders from the local Gestapo, none of the feared secret police had shown up at the prison, and no prisoners had been questioned. By December 22—six weeks after Martin’s arrest—nine of his original group remained. On that day, guards thundered down the corridor, announcing that they were being moved to the Dachau concentration camp.

  Martin, who was now in his own cell, felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He knew about the existence of Dachau, as did most Germans, but it was spoken about only in ominous whispers. Opened in an old World War I munitions factory near Munich in March 1933, Dachau was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis after they came to power. Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler had announced in the newspapers that Dachau would be utilized to incarcerate those who “threaten the security of the state.” During its first year, the camp held nearly five thousand prisoners, primarily German communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazis.

  But Martin had a very personal history with Dachau, too. In April 1933, his cousin, a lawyer in Munich, had been arrested and sent there. He died in Dachau three months later. Based on the grim stories he had heard, Martin considered the move to Dachau to be his own death sentence.

  The locks on the cells of the Dachau-bound prisoners were rapidly keyed open and the doors swung ajar by guards. Frantic to write a farewell note to his twin brother, Leopold, who lived with an aunt elsewhere in Germany, and to his uncle Julius, Martin scribbled on a scrap of paper. When he stepped into the corridor and passed the cell of a prisoner he had gotten to know, Martin pushed his folded-up note through the bars.

  At the Nuremberg train station, Martin and the eight other men brought in from Ansbach were loaded into a modern passenger train car, where they remained under guard for the hundred-mile ride to the Dachau depot. Upon arrival, their car alone was shunted to a sidetrack. The first thing Martin saw was SS troops in black uniforms with red swastikas, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, surrounding them on all sides.

  The SS pushed the prisoners off the train and down the platform, then herded them past some administrative buildings, the guards’ barracks, and an outside shooting range, where the SS practiced their marksmanship. Martin would soon learn that it doubled as an execution site. A heavy iron gate opened onto the prisoners’ fenced compound, above which was a metal sign that read, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, “Work will make you free.”

  Electrified barbed wire enclosed the rectangular compound—about three hundred by six hundred yards—on all sides. Tall gun towers rose up at strategic locations. Inside the compound was an infirmary, a laundry, workshops in which inmates produced goods ranging from bread to furniture, and a main yard for roll calls and other assemblies.

  The inmates lived in ten single-story barracks made of brick and concrete; each had been built to house 270 prisoners and was subdivided into five rooms designed to hold fifty-four men apiece. The men in each room were referred to, in military fashion, as a platoon. Every room had thin wooden bunks covered with straw and an attached washroom with a few sinks and flush toilets.

  When Martin and his group arrived, the guards pushed them into a large room and made them strip off their clothing. After their heads were completely shorn, they were ordered into a cold showe
r and herded naked into another room, where a camp doctor did a quick examination. They were then given lightweight, blue-and-white-striped uniforms to put on. Some of the men had arrived clutching the small bags they had been allowed to take from home when they were arrested. Now they had to leave the bags, and the only personal items they could take with them were whatever toiletries they could carry.

  In prison in Nuremberg, Martin had become friendly with a man named Ernst Dingfelder, who was deeply religious. Now Ernst whispered to Martin that he wanted to keep his Tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. Martin couldn’t believe his ears; it struck him as crazy to try to sneak a Jewish prayer shawl into a Nazi concentration camp. He argued back and forth with Ernst, telling him that if the guards found the shawl, they would likely wrap him in it before shooting him. At last, Martin convinced Ernst to leave it behind.

  Each prison uniform at Dachau had a number above the right breast. Martin’s was 31889. He soon realized that, according to Dachau’s numbering system, he was the 31,889th inmate since the camp’s opening. What he did not know was that he was also one of more than ten thousand Jews who had entered the concentration camp in the weeks since Kristallnacht.

  It was midnight when Martin’s group reached block 8, room 4. Crammed into the unheated space were two hundred prisoners, four times more than the space was built to hold. To make room, the built-in bunks had been replaced with two levels of six-foot-deep wooden shelving, one at ground level, the other about four feet off the floor. A thin layer of straw crawling with lice and fleas covered each one. Without room to turn over, the men slept body to body, their heads against the wall. Despite the freezing temperature, many spent the night uncovered, as there weren’t enough blankets to go around.

  Exhausted after little sleep, at five o’clock the next morning Martin stood for his first roll call. When this was complete, he and the others were led back inside and given watery ersatz coffee and bug-infested porridge. Dachau was a labor camp, but with the rapid influx of so many new prisoners, the officers in charge had not yet been able to schedule them all for forced-labor duties, which consisted of digging in gravel pits, repairing roads, and draining marshes, all under the watchful eyes of the guards. Instead, Martin and the rest of his group spent the day milling around in the main yard, clapping their hands and stamping their feet to keep them from freezing.