The Ritchie Boys: The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler
Guest Post: Book Review by Dr Norman Simms
Bruce Henderson. The Ritchie Boys: The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. London: William Collins, 2018. Originally entitled Sons and Soldiers, 2017. xii + 428 pp. + numerous black and white photographs.
A small group of several hundred Jewish teen-age boys who had managed to escape from Nazi Germany before the Holocaust began, eagerly sought an opportunity of fighting against Hitler when the United States entered the Second World War at the end of 1941. Leaving parents, siblings and other relatives and friends behind in Europe, they suffered the further trauma of dislocation and learning a new language and culture, and they burned to take revenge on the nation that had betrayed them. Once they reached the appropriate age to volunteer, yet unable as enemy nationals to be accepted, they waited to be drafted. Not soon enough, their talents and determination were noted, and they were granted citizenship.
The first part of this historical work weaves together brief biographical backgrounds in Germany, France and Holland of a selected number of these adolescents, their lives before and during Nazi rule, the desperate efforts by their parents to send them out of harm’s way, and their initial experiences in the New World. In the examples given by Henderson, these adolescents grew up in ordinary households, were not rigidly religious, and seemed no different than the children they went to school with and played on the streets, that is, until Nazi racial laws came along.
The second part advances their experiences in America. It begins with the difficulties of assimilating into new families and communities, where well-intentioned relatives struggled in the Depression to accommodate them and an uncomprehending and often unsympathetic society grumbled about their presence, and then to the training they received at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, following a period of months or years of being considered enemy aliens and therefore either unfit altogether for military service or given limited non-combat training and assignments. While these limitations and exclusions were frustrating and disappointing to the young men eager to make war on Nazi Germany, the conditions never approached the harshness or cruelty they had already undergone in their homelands in Europe.
The third part takes the narrative into the war. Trained to be interrogators of German prisoners of war and act as liaison with the French civilians once the invasion of Europe began, the boys found that reality did not always match with intentions—and that combat is a very messy and brutal business; that parachutes don’t land where they are supposed to; and that following the laws of engagement is something to be set aside in the heat of battle. They also discovered that Europeans did not all want to be liberated from the Nazis, certainly not by Americans or Jews. Yet eventually the Ritchie Boys were able to do the jobs they were sent over to perform, and they did them very well. Even when they themselves were captured by the Germans, their well-learned lessons in how to deal with the enemy came in handy and helped to save many American lives.
The Ritchie Boys came into their own during the D-Day landings in Normandy, the securing of beachheads and advancement to liberate France, and then enter Germany. Henderson continues to focus on a few of these German-Americans and their work alongside the American and British forces, sometimes bringing one or two of the boys together in the same actions. Much as the narrative gives a personal touch—the emotions felt by this soldier and that, the thoughts of their families still caught in Nazi territory and their hopes for a better life after the defeat of Hitler—to the description of battles in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany the traumatic effects of the war are superficially touched on.
If captured, there was an extra liability in being a Ritchie Boy, that is, a German-Jew with an American uniform, so that sometimes a rabid Nazi officer would pull them out of a group of POWs for special treatment, that is, summary execution. The closer the Allies came to the heart of the Third Reich and the entry into the death camps of the Nazi regime, the more the professionalism of the German-Jewish American soldiers was tested. Just before the start of the third section of the book, the author speaks most explicitly of the conflicted emotional state of the young men:
Like other Ritchie Boys, Stephen [Lewy] had been trained to detach himself from any personal or emotional aspects of interrogation. But as he faced the SS major that day, he could not shake the sense of haunting danger such men had instilled in him most of his life. Stephan realized that the closer he came to returning to Nazi Germany, the more pent-up resentment, anger even rage he was feeling. (p. 321)
It is tempting here to translate this rather superficial description into a more incisive psychohistorical statement more apt to the traumatic memories that came flooding back into the consciousness of this young man. Out of an unconscious memory, where the unbearable and unspeakable pains and humiliations had repressed, but where they continued to build up an energy by the almost daily experiences of separation from family, fear of the death of all whom he loved, and the knowledge that people he thought he could understand and trust were likely to be beyond comprehension and incapable of sympathy or empathy: these unimaginable truths were on the verge of breaking through into his rational and controllable part of his mind and overwhelming his normal self.
It was not just that the war was a personal way of coping with the confusions in their youth, but that they saw the Holocaust in a personal way that non-Jews couldn’t, even when fellow enlisted men and officers wept at the scenes of so much suffering. The Boys visited German homes, spoke to inhabitants, and came away feeling angry and sickened by the callousness and indifference and the denial of knowledge or complicity. Clearly the full larders, the warm clothing and the smug complaints against Allied bombing indicated that ordinary Germans profited by the robbing and murder of the Jews; and resented being forced to confront their outright or even tacit collusion. When forced to walk through the concentration camps and help with cleaning up the mess, “They watched the proceedings without showing any sympathy or remorse.” As one of the Ritchie Boys said, “It was a nation that would have to pay for its crimes for years to come.”
Throughout most of these war years (and for the German Jewish boys the Second World War began on 1 September, 1939, not with Pearl Harbour on 6 December 1941) the Ritchie Boys felt deep regrets about losing touch with their families and not being able to know whether or not their parents, siblings and other relatives were still alive. It was something always at least at the back of their minds. It was difficult for them to understand American isolationism, racism and poor educations. They had not grown up in very religious homes and assumed they were Germans before they were Jews, but Hitler made them acutely aware of who and what they were, and they wished to punish the Nazis for what they were doing and to make Germany the land pay for the crimes committed against Jews. More than that, the Ritchie Boys looked forward to a more liberal, just and cultured world, and they came to hope that they could help America become such a nation.
Most of the Ritchie Boys were separated from their birth families at a young age, and had experienced seeing friends, neighbours and relatives beaten or killed before their very eyes. Eventually they would understand why parents sent them away or why schoolmates turned on them after the Nazis came to power, but as youngsters these were confusing, frightening and traumatic events. The journeys to America were also fraught with dangers and fears for what lay ahead, and even the landing in the United States was a shock, especially when those into whose care they were given were not up to the task, either because their own families were suffering in the Depression, they lacked the emotional sympathy or stamina to deal with traumatized children and whose stories and backgrounds seemed incomprehensible to them. Henderson tells us about the successes, when the boys were able to fend for themselves, do well in school and take on small paying jobs to help the host families. We can only guess that not every child from Germany was able to cope or had the inner resources to gain top marks at Camp Ritchie and earn promotions during service overseas. Nor do we know how many young men grew up resentful of both their own and their foster parents, raged at a society that displayed anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and eventually slid into life-long mental illness.
Four final sections round out the book. There is a list of the nearly two thousand young German Jews who went through Camp Ritchie. A series of acknowledgments on all who aided the writer in compiling his data also serves as a guide to further reading and investigation. There is also a brief account of what happened to the main actors in this book after they returned to America, how they completed their educations, started families and pursued various careers, most having long and prosperous careers. Yet, as noted above, these success stories seem too neat and pat and gloss over what were surely other Ritchie Boys who could not adjust and aspects of the lives which seem so normal which could not all have avoided deep psychological injuries. In addition there is an Index, mostly of personal names, relevant places and key actions.