How young German Jews beat the Nazis
Their service in the U.S. Army is a stirring war story
There’s a 10-second scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan in which an Army private tauntingly brandishes his Star of David medallion at captured German soldiers passing by and identifies himself as “Juden” — Jewish.
It’s a brief but haunting scene, forcing the viewer to wonder what was it like for Jewish soldiers to fight the Germans.
Bruce Henderson’s amply titled history Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned With the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler (HarperCollins, 448 pp., eeeg out of four) provides one answer.
Henderson meticulously crafts a riveting non-fiction account of young Jewish men who were sent to America by their families to escape Nazi persecution. The eldest sons, Henderson tells us, were often sent away to survive and carry on the family name. These sons became U.S. citizens, and some volunteered to fight.
Sons and Soldiers opens in Germany in 1938 with the Nazis in power. The book focuses on a group of young German Jews, the terrible hardships they and their families endure, and how they finally make their way to America.
Many of the arrivals were mis- trusted as enemy aliens after arriving in the U.S. With their German accents, the young refugees who volunteered for military service often were viewed with suspicion and shunted into noncombatant roles.
That was until the U.S. military realized their potential as intelligence specialists. Their ability to speak German and their knowledge of Nazi-occupied territory made them invaluable.
The Army recruited about 2,000 of them. They were trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and were known as the Ritchie Boys.
The Ritchie Boys interrogated German prisoners and conducted psychological warfare against German troops in the field. Soldiers became students, immersed in foreign languages, interroga- tion techniques, house searches, mapmaking and combat survival.
The payoff came when interrogating captured German soldiers: “Such detailed information about German army units was useful not only for improving the questions they could ask prisoners … it could also be used as a show of knowledge to impress prisoners; what the Americans already knew might prove unnerving.”
Henderson’s research and interviews with scores of veterans gives us a richly detailed story that puts readers alongside the Ritchie Boys in some of the darkest moments of history, from Kristallnacht to D-Day to the liberation of the Buchenwald death camp.
In addition to providing sobering insight on how Jewish soldiers fought the Nazis, Sons and Soldiers is a spellbinding account of extraordinary men at war.