The Ritchie Boys, part of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service (MIS) at the War Department, were an organization of soldiers in World War II with sizable numbers of German and Austrian recruits who were used primarily for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe. Trained at secret Camp Ritchie in Washington County, Maryland, many of the total around 22,000 men and women in service were German-speaking immigrants to the United States, often Jews, who fled Nazi persecution. After the war, many former Ritchie Boys rose to important positions in the military and in the intelligence community. In addition to interrogation and counter-intelligence, they were trained in psychological warfare to study and demoralize the enemy, and some later served as prosecutors and translators in the Nuremberg trials. The parent organization of the Ritchie Boys, the MIS, was commanded in Washington by Brigadier General Hayes Adlai Kroner for most of the war.
Camp Ritchie The Ritchie Boys consisted of approximately 20,000 servicemen and 2,000 Women's Army Corps members, who were trained for U.S. Army Intelligence during World War II at the secret Camp Ritchie training facility. Most of the men sent to Camp Ritchie for training were assigned there because of fluency in German, French, Italian, Polish, or other languages that were needed by the US Army during the war. Members had been drafted into or volunteered to join the United States Army and, after their ability to speak an enemy language had been discovered, were sent to Camp Ritchie on secret orders. Some of the Jewish refugees who were part of this program had originally arrived in the US as children, many without their parents, and were also among the One Thousand Children. They were trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, later officially known as Fort Ritchie (it was closed in 1998 under the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure Commission). They were specially trained in methods of intelligence, counterintelligence, interrogation, investigation and psychological warfare. Nine hundred of these men also attended special training at Camp Sharpe, Pennsylvania. The Jewish refugees were qualified for these tasks because they knew the German language and understood the German mentality and behavior better than most American-born soldiers. The role of the soldiers was, therefore, to work in the front lines, at strategic corps and army levels, at interrogation, analyzing German forces and plans, and to study and demoralize the enemy. The majority of them went on to work as members of the US Counter Intelligence Corps. During the Battle of the Bulge, two Ritchie Boys were recognized by their accents, and the German officer Curt Bruns then ordered them both to be summarily executed; he said, "The Jews have no right to live in Germany." He was captured on February 15, 1945, put on trial for the murders, and sentenced to death by firing squad. Bruns was executed on June 15, 1945, the first World War II criminal to be executed by the US Army.
Europe After the German declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, the Ritchie Boys became an important weapon for the Allies. Many of them entered Europe on D-Day (6 June 1944). Others followed over time. Shortly after reaching land, they left their units and pursued their special tasks. They fed the Allies valuable information. General Oscar Koch (General Patton's G-2) acknowledged that the advance warning of the German Bulge offensive occurred because of information gathered by their MIS units. Moreover, the Ritchie Boys helped break German resistance by demoralizing them in both open and covert operations. They interrogated prisoners-of-war and defectors to obtain information about the Germans' force levels, troop movements, and physical and psychological states. A common interrogation tactic was to use the Germans' fear of transfer into Soviet custody. By means of targeted disinformation by newspaper announcements, flyers, radio broadcasts, and sound trucks, the German population and military were encouraged to cease their resistance to the Allied invasion.
Pacific Camp Ritchie also trained over 500 Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) for PACMIRS (Pacific Military Intelligence Research Service), a program to translate documents the U.S. Navy captured in Saipan in July 1944. Fifteen crates of documents were sent to Camp Ritchie for training purposes and were not considered to have any military intelligence. One Nisei, Kazuo Yamane, digging into a crate, retrieved what he believed to be a textbook but soon discovered it to be meeting minutes from a gathering of all of Japan's armories. The notes contained locations of the armories, the number of weapons held by Imperial Japan, and spare parts held and indicated that Japan had half as many of weapons available to it in 1944 as it had in 1943. Yamane immediately contacted his superior, who contacted the War Department, which translated the text into English. The Americans then located and destroyed the armories. Yamane called this act his "Proof of Loyalty" because he claimed that he could easily have not reported the document to his superiors. A 2017 film, Proof of Loyalty: Kazuo Yamane and the Nisei Soldiers of Hawaii, detailed his time in the service and at Ritchie.
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