Man Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a brand new life in the USA however returned to Europe throughout World Warfare II as a member of a army intelligence program that skilled him to interrogate prisoners of battle, died on Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, Mich. He was 101.
His dying, at a hospital, was confirmed by his spouse, Susanna Piontek, a German author.
Mr. Stern was one of many so-called Ritchie Boys, a bunch named for a secret Military camp in Maryland that served as a coaching heart the place an estimated 11,000 troopers — 2,000 to three,000 of them European Jews, principally from Germany — accomplished a full course of instruction.
They realized, amongst different issues, easy methods to interrogate, interpret and translate for international officers; acknowledge the small print of imprisoned German and Italian prisoners’ uniforms; and extract important info from paperwork drafted in bureaucratic German.
“We had been combating an American battle, and we had been additionally combating an intensely private battle,” Mr. Stern instructed The Washington Put up in 2005. “We had been in that battle with each inch of our being.”
He was talking on the premiere of a documentary, “The Ritchie Boys,” directed by Christian Bauer, held on the shuttered camp within the mountains of Maryland.
Mr. Stern landed in Normandy in June 1944, three days after the D-Day invasion, served in Germany, Belgium and France and interrogated prisoners till the top of the battle and for some time after.
No less than 60 p.c of the actionable intelligence within the European theater was amassed by the Ritchie Boys, in line with David Frey, director of the Middle for Holocaust Research and Genocide at the USA Navy Academy at West Level. Dr. Frey stated that there are most likely not more than 25 or 30 Ritchie boys nonetheless alive.
Certainly one of Mr. Stern’s methods for forcing recalcitrant prisoners to cooperate was to faux to be a fierce however erratic Soviet commissar named Krukow. He dressed within the applicable regalia; spoke in a Russian accent (based mostly on the voice of the Mad Russian, a personality on the comic Eddie Cantor’s radio present); stored {a photograph} of Stalin supposedly signed to Krukow close by; and threatened to ship the imprisoned Germans to Siberia.
“We didn’t break everybody,” Mr. Stern wrote in “Invisible Ink: A Memoir” (2020). “A few of our captives might have mirrored on the impossibility of transporting prisoners throughout half a continent to face the dreaded Russians. However principally the stratagem labored.”
Günther Stern was born on Jan. 14, 1922, in Hildesheim, Germany. His father, Julius, offered textiles. His mom, Hedwig (Silberberg) Stern, was a homemaker who helped her husband in his work.
Günther was 11 when Hitler took energy in 1933, Inside 4 years, the Nazis’ terror marketing campaign in opposition to Jews had made the household’s life insupportable.
Günther recalled being ostracized at his all-male college.
“I went to my father someday and I stated, ‘Courses have gotten a torture chamber,’” he stated in an interview with the CBS Information present “60 Minutes” for a section on the Ritchie Boys in 2021.
In 1937, his mother and father determined to ship Günther, their oldest little one, to reside along with his Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel in St. Louis. However after he arrived, he couldn’t discover a sponsor to deliver the remainder of his household — his mother and father; his sister, Eleonore; and his brother, Werner — to the USA. All 4 had been killed by the Nazis, however Mr. Stern was by no means sure if their deaths occurred within the Warsaw Ghetto, the place they hung out, or in a dying camp.
Günther completed highschool in St. Louis — the place he adopted a girlfriend’s suggestion that he change his title to Man — and labored as a busboy in a lodge whereas attending Saint Louis College. He tried to enlist within the Navy after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor; he was rejected as a result of he hadn’t been born in the USA, however he was then drafted by the Military and despatched for fundamental coaching at Camp Barkley, Texas, the place he turned a naturalized citizen in 1943. He was in the end transferred to Camp Ritchie.
Whereas in Germany, he used a way of mass interrogation that helped him earn a Bronze Star. His different honors embrace knight of the Legion of Honor, which he acquired from France on Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017.
After his discharge, he accomplished his schooling, financed by the G.I. Invoice of Rights. He graduated from Hofstra School (now College) in 1948 with a bachelor’s diploma in romance languages, then earned a grasp’s diploma in German in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1954 from the Columbia College Graduate College of Arts and Sciences.
For the following half-century, he taught German at Denison College, in Granville, Ohio, and was chairman of the German division and dean of graduate schooling and analysis on the College of Cincinnati; chairman of the division of German and Slavic languages and literatures on the College of Maryland; and vp and provost for educational affairs and, later, distinguished professor of German literature and cultural historical past at Wayne State College in Detroit.
At his dying, Mr. Stern was director of the Worldwide Institute of the Righteous at the Zekelman Holocaust Middle in Farmington Hills, Mich. The institute explores and researches moral habits through the Holocaust; Mr. Stern was particularly excited about altruism, specifically in how Jews helped Jews.
Ms. Piontek is his solely instant survivor. His son, Mark, died in 2006. His marriage to Margith Langweiler led to divorce. His second marriage, to Judith Edelstein Owens, ended along with her dying in 2003.
Mr. Stern translated Ms. Piontek’s story assortment “Have We Probably Met Earlier than? And Different Tales” (2011) into English and wrote the preface. She, in flip, translated Mr. Stern’s memoir into German.
Mr. Stern was 98 when he was interviewed for “The U.S. and the Holocaust” (2022), a three-part PBS documentary directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, and 99 when he talked to Jon Wertheim of “60 Minutes.” In each interviews, he wore a salmon-colored blazer and was an interesting presence as he eloquently recalled his previous.
“He had a twinkle in his eye and a lightness in his step,” Ms. Novick stated in a telephone interview.
Within the documentary, Mr. Stern recalled coming into the Buchenwald focus camp after its liberation in April 1945 and seeing the skeletal however nonetheless residing inmates.
“I used to be a hardened soldier by then, however I couldn’t assist myself,” he stated. “So I used to be crying. I seemed round and Sergeant Hadley, from a Protestant household in Ohio, he was bawling like a child, as I used to be. You couldn’t take it. However they might — the perpetrators who might do such a factor, and the victims who needed to endure it.”
Ms. Novick stated that Mr. Stern was a vital voice within the documentary.
“He checked so many containers for us,” she stated, “as somebody who grew up in Germany, who managed to get to the USA, who misplaced members of the family, went again to struggle the Germans, after which turned a scholar.”
