German Jewish Soldiers in World War II

The Ritchie Boys  

Albert Ritchie was governor of Maryland in the 1930’s. Therefore an army camp in Maryland was named in his memory. This camp became the military HQ of some 900 German Jews who had escaped the mass murders of all European Jews living in German occupied countries from Norway to Italy and from France to Russia.

The German Jews who trained at Fort Ritchie were volunteers who wanted to help the American war effort. Because they all spoke German with the same accents and vocabulary as the German soldiers, the Defense Department enlisted these Jewish men as interrogators of German war prisoners. The prisoners were asked, in their native tongue, to tell their interrogators how many German soldiers faced American forces in various battlegrounds. The Germans were also asked about strategy of the German commanders, about military supplies and about the morale of the German troops.

At first the German prisoners refused to say anything during their interrogation strategies to get information from the prisoners. First they told the prisoners that they, the Americans, already knew a great deal about German intentions and strategies so that it would appear that the prisoners were not giving away much more than was already known to Americans. In addition, the Jewish questioners told the Nazi prisoners that they would be sent to the Russians if they refused to cooperate with Americans. Fear of the Russians was justified. The Russians killed numerous German prisoners and kept many others from ever returning home.

The German Jews who volunteered as interrogators were sent to the front lines of the fighting between US soldiers and Germans There they learned about huge ammunition installations which the Army Air Forces bombed into immense explosions once their locations were revealed to the interrogators and sent to the Air Forces. The German Jews who fought for the USA were all volunteers, because at the outbreak of the Second World War, no German born residents of the United States were admitted to the armed forces unless they had become citizens. It was feared that Germans living in the USA without becoming citizens were possibly in touch with their relatives in Germany. The failure to admit German born residents into American armed services was not applied to German Jews, as it was inconceivable that anyone Jewish would betray America to their Nazi persecutors who had murdered 6 million Jews all over Europe and burned all synagogues to the ground.

Today, only a few of the Ritchie boys are still alive. Yet, in their old age these German Jews are repeatedly shown on American television as men who loved their new country and were instrumental in helping America win the war against the European barbarians who, like the Ukrainians, sided with the Germans and slaughtered 33,000 Jews at a ravine called Babi Yar . Ukrainians also formed a Ukrainian unit who marched with the German into battle. Like the Poles who murdered innumerable Jews during the German occupation of Poland, almost all European countries killed all Jews from babies to aged adults. The Holocaust was not only a German enterprise but was aided by the entire Christian population of Europe.

Shalom u'vracha.

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