On July 12, 1973, a fire swept through the facilities of the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. In the aftermath of the inferno, the US Army estimated that it had lost nearly 18 million (around one-third) of its military personnel files, most of which had never been copied. Amongst those irreplaceable documents were the records of a group of World War Two soldiers who were known as the Ritchie Boys.
The Ritchie Boys were approximately 9,000 US servicemen who received their training at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. They were mostly young Jewish Germans and Austrians who had fled their native homelands during the 1930s after the Nazi Party’s rise to power. The US Army recognized that their familiarity with the German language and culture was a crucial asset to counterintelligence and drafted them.
The Ritchie Boys began arriving in Europe along with the invading US forces on D-Day. They provided invaluable information about enemy movements and morale based on their interrogations of captured German prisoners. The Ritchie Boys also used psychological warfare to combat the enemy. Using leaflets, newspaper declarations and even loudspeakers mounted on trucks, they operated on the front lines and bombarded German troops with demoralizing propaganda, hoping to persuade them to surrender. Ironically, during battle, they faced conflicting fears and perils. They risked being mistakenly shot by their fellow Americans because of their German accents, and simultaneously feared being caught by the Germans who might discover that they were Jews.
After the war, the Ritchie Boys records were filed as classified information. They were stored in St. Louis and ultimately destroyed by the blaze. It was thus with much interest that the Kleinman Holocaust Education Center received this past year a comprehensive collection that had been maintained by the late Private Kurt Adler. The donated collection includes the then-classified military books, instruction pamphlets, strategic maps, as well as notebooks that were used in his training. To our knowledge, it is one of the only extant sources of comprehensive documentation on the Ritchie Boys.
Yet for Private Adler and so many other men in his unit, this war against evil was extremely personal. Included in the artifacts donated were Adler’s personal photo albums and correspondence.
Kurt Adler was born in Frankfurt, Germany. His father, Hermann, was an early victim of the Holocaust, murdered in Buchenwald in 1938. Kurt managed to flee to New York in 1939, and his mother, Klara, followed in 1940 on the SS Rex – the last boat to arrive in the United States with German refugees. His younger sisters, Lotte and Henny, were unable to obtain passage and were placed in a Jewish orphanage in Holland in the hope they would be able to join the family in the United States at a later date. Tragically, that never occurred. The KHEC Adler Collection is replete with letters they wrote to their mother and brother from the orphanage. A final letter came after Yom Kippur of 1941 in which Henny and Lotte described their yom tov experiences and assured their mother that they had fasted well. After the war, Klara received a heart-breaking telegram notifying her that all the children of the orphanage had been deported in 1943 and assumed killed in the Sobibor death camp in Poland.
When our Archives Team reviewed the collection, they came across a partially singed and water-damaged letter written by Clara to her son in 1959. Further research proved that it was amongst mail sent to Los Angeles abroad TWA flight 582 that crashed in Chicago. Amazingly, the letter was recovered and eventually delivered. Indeed, to Private Adler, all of his documents symbolized something greater than merely American triumph and heroism. These documents were, and continue to be, a personal legacy of what was lost and rebuilt.
