Margith Langweiler News Today

To tap into the German PoWs’ greatest dread, Stern pretended to be ‘Commissar Krukow’, an irascible, semi-demented Russian liaison officer

Guy Stern, who has died aged 101, was a German-born member of the Ritchie Boys, an American Military Intelligence interrogation unit, in the Second World War.

  (JTA) — Guy Stern, a German Jewish refugee who was one of the last known surviving members of the celebrated World War II military intelligence unit known as the “Ritchie Boys” and who became an accomplished Holocaust scholar after the war, died Dec. 7, a little over a month shy of his 102nd birthday. […]

He escaped as a teenager and later became one of the Ritchie Boys, a secret Army program that recruited refugees to gather battlefield intelligence.

Guy Stern left a mark, first as one of the “Ritchie Boys” recruited to a secret US military intelligence program that helped defeat Nazi Germany, and later, after the war, as a professor of German literature and culture, his attention ever tuned to the stories of exiles and immigrants.