Guy Stern fled Germany, then interrogated Nazis
Guy Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a new life in the United States but returned to Europe during World War II as a member of a military intelligence programthat trained himto interrogate prisoners ofwar, died Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, Mich. He was 101.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Susanna Piontek, a German writer.
Stern was one of the socalled Ritchie Boys, a group named for a secret Army camp in Maryland that served as a training center where an estimated 11,000 soldiers — 2,000 to 3,000 of them European Jews, mostly from Germany — completed a full course of instruction.
They learned, among other things, how to interrogate, interpret and translate for foreign officials; recognize the details of imprisoned German and Italian prisoners’ uniforms; and extract vital information from documents drafted in bureaucratic German.
“We were fighting an American war, and we were also fighting an intensely personal war,” Stern told The Washington Post in 2005. “We were in that war with every inch of our being.”
He was speaking at the premiere of a documentary, “The Ritchie Boys,” directed by Christian Bauer, held at the shuttered camp in the mountains of Maryland.
Stern landed in Normandy in June 1944, three days after the D-day invasion; served in Germany, Belgium and France; and interrogated prisoners unt i l the end of the war and for a while after. At least 60% of the actionable intelligence in the European theater was amassed by the Ritchie Boys, according to David Frey, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Genocide at the U. S. Military Academy atwest Point. Frey said there are probably no more than 25 or 30 Ritchie boys still alive.
One of Stern’s strategies for forcing recalcitrant prisoners to cooperate was to pretend to be a fierce but erratic Soviet commissar named Krukow. He dressed in the appropriate regalia; spoke in a Russian accent ( based on the voice of the Mad Russian, a character on comedian Eddie Cantor’s radio show); kept a photograph of Josef Stalin supposedly signed to Krukow nearby; and threatened to send the imprisoned Germans to Siberia.
“We didn’t break everyone,” Stern wrote in “Invisible Ink: A Memoir” (2020). “Some of our captives may have reflected on the impossibility of transporting prisoners across half a continent to face the feared Russians. But mostly the stratagem worked.”
Günther Stern was born Jan. 14, 1922, inhildesheim, Germany. His father, Julius, sold textiles. His mother, Hedwig (Silberberg) Stern, was a homemaker who helped her husband in his work.
Günther Stern was 11 when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Within four years, thenazis’ terror campaign against Jews had made the family’s life intolerable.
Stern recalled being ostracized at his all- male school.
“I went to my father one day, and I said, ‘ Classes are becoming a torture chamber,’ ” he said in an interview with CBS News show “60 Minutes” for a segment on the Ritchie Boys in 2021.
In 1937, his parents decided to send Günther, their oldest child, to live with his Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel in St. Louis. But after he arrived, he could not find a sponsor to bring the rest of his family — his parents; his sister, Eleonore; and his brother, Werner — to the United States. All four were killed by the Nazis, but Stern was never certain if their deaths occurred in Poland’swarsaw Ghetto, where they spent time, or in a death camp.
Stern f inished high school in St. Louis and worked as a busser in a hotel while attending Saint Louisuniversity. He tried to enlist in the Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; he was rejected because he hadn’t been born in the United States, but he was then drafted by the Army and sent for basic training at Camp Barkley, Texas, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1943. He was ultimately transferred to Camp Ritchie.
While in Germany, he used a method of mass interrogation that helped him earn a Bronze Star.