Man Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a brand new life in the US however returned to Europe throughout World Warfare II as a member of a army intelligence program that educated him to interrogate prisoners of struggle, died on Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, Mich. He was 101.
His demise, 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, largely from Germany — accomplished a full course of instruction.
They realized, amongst different issues, interrogate, interpret and translate for overseas officers; acknowledge the small print of imprisoned German and Italian prisoners’ uniforms; and extract important data from paperwork drafted in bureaucratic German.
“We have been preventing an American struggle, and we have been additionally preventing an intensely private struggle,” Mr. Stern informed The Washington Put up in 2005. “We have been in that struggle 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 tip of the struggle and for some time after.
Not less than 60 p.c of the actionable intelligence within the European theater was amassed by the Ritchie Boys, based on David Frey, director of the Middle for Holocaust Research and Genocide at the US Army Academy at West Level. Dr. Frey mentioned that there are in all probability not more than 25 or 30 Ritchie boys nonetheless alive.
One among Mr. Stern’s methods for forcing recalcitrant prisoners to cooperate was to fake to be a fierce however erratic Soviet commissar named Krukow. He dressed within the acceptable 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); saved {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 scary Russians. However largely 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 towards Jews had made the household’s life insupportable.
Günther recalled being ostracized at his all-male faculty.
“I went to my father at some point and I mentioned, ‘Lessons have gotten a torture chamber,’” he mentioned in an interview with the CBS Information present “60 Minutes” for a phase on the Ritchie Boys in 2021.
In 1937, his dad and mom determined to ship Günther, their oldest baby, to reside along with his Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel in St. Louis. However after he arrived, he couldn’t discover a sponsor to carry the remainder of his household — his dad and mom; his sister, Eleonore; and his brother, Werner — to the US. All 4 have 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 demise 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 resort 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 US, however he was then drafted by the Military and despatched for primary 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 technique 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 training, 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 Faculty 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 training and analysis on the College of Cincinnati; chairman of the division of German and Slavic languages and literatures on the College of Maryland; and vice chairman and provost for tutorial affairs and, later, distinguished professor of German literature and cultural historical past at Wayne State College in Detroit.
At his demise, 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 conduct through the Holocaust; Mr. Stern was particularly considering altruism, particularly in how Jews helped Jews.
Ms. Piontek is his solely fast 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 demise in 2003.
Mr. Stern translated Ms. Piontek’s story assortment “Have We Presumably 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 attractive 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 cellphone 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 dwelling inmates.
“I used to be a hardened soldier by then, however I couldn’t assist myself,” he mentioned. “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 may — the perpetrators who might do such a factor, and the victims who needed to endure it.”
Ms. Novick mentioned that Mr. Stern was a important voice within the documentary.
“He checked so many bins for us,” she mentioned, “as somebody who grew up in Germany, who managed to get to the US, who misplaced relations, went again to combat the Germans, after which turned a scholar.”
