Guy Stern, who fled Germany and then interrogated Nazis, dies at age 101

Guy Sternwho fled rising anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany at age 15 for a new life in the United States but returned to Europe during World War II as a member of a military intelligence program that trained him in interrogating prisoners of war, died on December 7 in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He was 101.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Susanna Piontek, a German writer.

Mr. Stern was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a group named after a secret army camp in Maryland that served as a training center where an estimated 11,000 soldiers — including 2,000 to 3,000 European Jews, mostly from Germany — completed full training. course of instruction.

They learned, among other things, how to interrogate, interpret and translate for foreign officials; recognize the details of the uniforms of captured German and Italian prisoners; and extract essential information from documents written in bureaucratic German.

“We were fighting an American war, and we were also fighting an intensely personal war.” Mr. Stern told The Washington Post in 2005. “We were involved in that war with every inch of our being.”

He spoke at the premiere of a documentary, “The Ritchie Boys,” directed by Christian Bauer, held at the closed camp in the Maryland mountains.

Mr. Stern landed in Normandy in June 1944, three days after the D-Day invasion, served in Germany, Belgium and France and interrogated prisoners until the end of the war and for a while afterward.

At least 60 percent of the useful intelligence on the European stage was gathered by the Ritchie Boys, according to David Frey, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Genocide at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Dr. Frey said there are probably no more than 25 to 30 Ritchie boys still alive.

One of Mr. Stern’s strategies to coerce recalcitrant prisoners into cooperation was to pose as a fierce but erratic Soviet commissar named Krukow. He dressed in the appropriate regalia; spoke with a Russian accent (based on the voice of the Mad Russian, a character from comedian Eddie Cantor’s radio show); kept a photo of Stalin, supposedly signed Krukow, nearby; and threatened to send the captured Germans to Siberia.

“We didn’t break everyone,” Mr. Stern wrote in “Invisible Ink: A Memoir” (2020). “Some of our prisoners may have reflected on the impossibility of transporting prisoners across half a continent to face the feared Russians. But most of the time the strategy worked.”

Günther Stern was born on January 14, 1922 in Hildesheim, Germany. His father, Julius, sold textiles. His mother, Hedwig (Silberberg) Stern, was a housewife who helped her husband with his work.

Günther was eleven when Hitler took power in 1933. Within four years, the Nazis’ campaign of terror against the Jews had made the family’s life unbearable.

Günther recalled being excluded from his all-male school.

“One day I went to my father and said, ‘The classes are turning into a torture chamber.’” he said in an interview with the CBS News show “60 Minutes” for a segment about the Ritchie Boys in 2021.

In 1937, his parents decided to send Günther, their eldest child, to his Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel in St. Louis. But after he arrived, he couldn’t 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 Mr. Stern was never sure whether their deaths occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto, where they spent time, or in a death camp.

Günther completed high school in St. Louis — where he took a friend’s suggestion to change his name to Guy — and worked as a busboy at a hotel while attending Saint Louis University. He attempted to enlist in the Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; He was rejected because he was not born in the United States, but was subsequently drafted by the Army and sent for basic training to Camp Barkley, Texas, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1943. Eventually he was transferred to Camp Ritchie.

While in Germany, he used a method of mass interrogation that helped him earn a Bronze Star. His other awards include Knight of the Legion of Honor, which he received from France on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017.

After his discharge, he completed his education, funded by the GI Bill of Rights. He graduated from Hofstra College (now University) in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages, then earned a master’s degree in German in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1954 from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

For the next half century he taught German at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and served as chairman of the German department and dean of university education and research at the University of Cincinnati; chairman of the department of German and Slavic languages ​​and literatures at the University of Maryland; and vice president and provost for academic affairs and later professor of German literature and cultural history at Wayne State University in Detroit.

At the time of his death, Mr. Stern was director of the International Institute of the Righteous in the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The institute researches and investigates ethical behavior during the Holocaust; Mr. Stern was particularly interested in altruism, especially the way Jews helped Jews.

Mrs. Piontek is his only immediate survivor. His son Mark died in 2006. His marriage to Margith Langweiler ended in divorce. His second marriage, to Judith Edelstein Owens, ended with her death in 2003.

Mr. Stern translated Ms. Piontek’s collection of short stories ‘Have we perhaps met before? And Other Stories” (2011) in English and wrote the foreword. She, in turn, translated Mr. Stern’s memoirs into German.

Mr. Stern was 98 when he was interviewed for “The US and the Holocaust” (2022), a three-part PBS documentary directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, and 99 when he spoke with Jon Wertheim of ’60 Minutes’. In both interviews, he wore a salmon-colored blazer and was a captivating presence as he eloquently recalled his past.

“He had a twinkle in his eye and a lightness in his step,” Ms. Novick said in a telephone interview.

In the documentary, Mr. Stern recalled entering the Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation in April 1945 and seeing the skeletal but still living prisoners.

“I was a hardened soldier then, but I couldn’t do anything about it,” he said. “So I cried. I looked around and Sergeant Hadley, from a Protestant family in Ohio, was crying like a child, just like me. You couldn’t bear it. But they could – the perpetrators who could do something like that, and the victims who had to endure it.”

Ms. Novick said Mr. Stern was a critical voice in the documentary.

“He checked so many boxes for us,” she said, “as someone who grew up in Germany, who managed to make it to the United States, who lost family members, went back to fight the Germans and then became a scholar.”