Jay Stern, who fled rising anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany when he was 15 for a brand new life in the USA however returned to Europe throughout World Battle II as a member of a army intelligence program that skilled him to interrogate prisoners of struggle, died on December 7. /December. In West Bloomfield, Michigan, he was 101 years outdated.
His dying within the hospital was confirmed by his spouse, German author Susanna Piontek.
Mr. Stern was one of many so-called “Ritchie Boys,” a gaggle named after a secret Military camp in Maryland that served as a coaching middle the place an estimated 11,000 troopers — 2,000 to three,000 of them European Jews, most of them from Germany — accomplished full coaching. Educating path.
They realized, amongst different issues, the way to interrogate, interpret and translate for overseas officers; Study concerning the particulars of the uniforms of German and Italian prisoners; Extracting very important info from paperwork written in bureaucratic German.
“We have been preventing an American struggle, and we have been additionally preventing an intense private struggle,” Mr. Stern advised The Washington Publish in 2005. “We have been in that struggle with each inch of our being.”
He was talking on the premiere of Christian Bauer’s documentary “The Ritchie Boys,” held on the enclosed camp within the mountains of Maryland.
Mr. Stern landed in Normandy in June 1944, three days after the D-Day invasion, and served in Germany, Belgium and France interrogating prisoners till the top of the struggle and for a interval afterward.
Not less than 60% of actionable intelligence within the European Theater was collected by Richie Boys, in keeping with David Fry, director of the Middle for Holocaust and Genocide Research on the U.S. Navy Academy at West Level. Dr. Fry mentioned there have been in all probability not more than 25 or 30 Ritchie boys nonetheless alive.
One in every of Mr. Stern’s methods for coercing rebellious prisoners into cooperation was to faux to be a fierce however eccentric Soviet commissar named Kroko. He was dressed appropriately. Converse with a Russian accent (based mostly on the voice of Mad Russian, a personality on comic Eddie Cantor’s radio present); He stored a supposedly autographed photograph of Stalin of Krokov close by; He threatened to ship the imprisoned Germans to Siberia.
“We didn’t break everybody,” Mr. Stern wrote in his e-book “Invisible Ink: A Memoir” (2020). Maybe a few of our prisoners thought it inconceivable to move prisoners throughout half a continent to confront the fearsome Russians. However principally the trick labored.
Günther Stern was born on January 14, 1922 in Hildesheim, Germany. His father, Julius, bought textiles. His mom, Hedwig (Silberberg) Stern, was a housewife who helped her husband together with his work.
Günther was 11 years outdated when Hitler took energy in 1933. Inside 4 years, the Nazi terror marketing campaign towards Jews had made the household’s life insufferable.
Gunther remembers being an outcast at his all-boys faculty.
“I went to my dad in the future and advised him the classroom had develop into a torture chamber,” he mentioned in an interview with CBS Information’ “60 Minutes” in a section concerning the Richie Boys in 2021.
In 1937, his dad and mom determined to ship Günter, their eldest baby, to stay together with his Uncle Beno and Aunt Ethel in St. Louis. However after arriving, he was unable to discover a sponsor to convey the remainder of his household – his dad and mom; His sister, Eleonore. And his brother Werner to the USA. All 4 have been killed by the Nazis, however Mr. Stern was by no means certain whether or not their deaths occurred within the Warsaw Ghetto, the place they hung out, or in a dying camp.
Gunter completed highschool in St. Louis—the place he took up his girlfriend’s suggestion to vary his identify to Jay—and labored as a lodge bus driver whereas attending St. Louis College. Tried to enlist within the Navy after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor; He was rejected as a result of he was not born in the USA, however was then drafted by the Military and despatched for primary coaching at Camp Barkley, Texas, the place he grew to become a naturalized citizen in 1943. He was ultimately transferred to Camp Ritchie. .
Whereas in Germany, he used a gaggle interrogation approach that helped him earn a Bronze Star. His different honors embrace the Legion of Honour, which he obtained from France on Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017.
After his discharge, he accomplished his schooling, funded by the GI Invoice of Rights. He graduated from Hofstra Faculty (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 subsequent half-century, he taught German at Denison College, in Granville, Ohio, and was chair of the German division and dean of graduate schooling and analysis on the College of Cincinnati; Chair of the Division of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures on the College of Maryland; Vice President and Provost for Educational Affairs, he later grew to become Distinguished Professor of German Literature and Cultural Historical past at Wayne State College in Detroit.
On the time of his dying, Mr. Stern was director of the Worldwide Institute for the Righteous on the Zikelman Holocaust Middle in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The institute explores and researches moral conduct in the course of the Holocaust; Mr. Stern was notably fascinated with altruism, notably how Jews helped Jews.
Mrs. Piontek is his solely direct survivor. His son, Mark, died in 2006. His marriage to Margeth Langweiler led to divorce. His second marriage, to Judith Edelstein Owens, ended together with her dying in 2003.
Mr. Stern translated Ms. Piontek’s assortment of tales, “Have We Ever Met?” And Different Tales” (2011) into English and wrote the introduction. She, in flip, 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, Len Novick and Sarah Botstein. To Jon Wertheim on “60 Minutes.” In each interviews, he wore a salmon-colored jacket and was a fascinating presence as he eloquently recalled his previous.
“He had a twinkle in his eye and a lightness in his step,” Ms. Novick mentioned in a telephone interview.
Within the documentary, Mr. Stern remembers coming into Buchenwald focus camp after its liberation in April 1945 and seeing skeletal however nonetheless alive prisoners.
“I used to be a hardened soldier on the time, however I could not assist myself,” he mentioned. “So I used to be crying. I seemed round and Sergeant Hadley, from a Protestant household in Ohio, was screaming like a toddler, like me. You possibly can’t take that. However they will – the perpetrators who may do one thing like that, and the victims who needed to take it.”
Ms. Novick mentioned Mr. Stern was a crucial voice within the documentary.
“He ticks so many packing containers for us, as somebody who grew up in Germany, made it to the USA, misplaced members of the family, got here again to combat the Germans, after which grew to become a researcher,” she mentioned.
