Telegraph Obituaries
Fri, February 9, 2024
Guy Stern on entering the US Army: after escaping to America in 1937, he never saw his family again
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.
The Ritchie Boys were composed of German, Austrian and Czech refugees and immigrants, many of them, like Stern, Jewish. They were encouraged to converse in the language of their enemies and were selected for their linguistic skills, cultural background and intelligence.
In June 1944, shortly after D-Day, Stern embarked at Southampton and landed in Normandy. Within minutes, he was using abandoned crates as makeshift interrogation tables and chairs. The first German PoW that he interrogated was a tough artilleryman.
The man had been thoroughly briefed on his rights and was showing no sign of cooperating when a German shell came right over their heads. Both men knew that more were probably on their way. Stern’s questioning became urgent and menacing. He wanted answers at once. The man gave way.
After several successful interrogations, Stern was promoted to sergeant and given the task of collating and analysing reports from multiple sources. He was able to assess the state of German morale and to answer the question of how they managed to repair bombed railway tracks and rolling stock so quickly.
Guy Stern, left, on VE Day, May 1945, in Germany, with his fellow soldiers Walter Sears (centre) and Fred Howard (right)
Were there diseases among the German troops which might infect the Allied forces? What were the Allies’ most (and least) effective propaganda leaflets in Germany? Were the Germans close to launching a new rocket or embarking on chemical warfare? What progress had they made towards making an atomic bomb? Stern’s reports provided vital information.
He and his team were also in constant demand from bomber pilots who wanted the exact coordinates of important strategic targets. Their work, however, was hindered by the difficulty of persuading the most intransigent PoWs to give information.
They resolved, therefore, to tap into their prisoners’ greatest dread, the fear that they would be handed over to the Russians and sent to gulags in Siberia where they would probably starve to death. Stern was re-invented as Commissar Krukow, an irascible, semi-demented Russian liaison officer.
A uniform was found for him and he adopted a harsh Russian accent and a range of alarming growls and gesticulations. As the Allies advanced through Belgium, Holland and Germany, he and his comrades were constantly engaged in psychological warfare and, for the most part, this new stratagem worked.
After a Nazi officer specifically ordered the killing of captured German Jews, two fellow Ritchie Boys from another team were executed. Stern and his colleagues found the makeshift graves of their comrades. They resolved to gather every piece of evidence and this led to the reported capture, trial and execution of the man after the war.
Guy Stern's parents, Julius and Hedwig, and his siblings Werner and Eleonore, in 1938, the year after he had been sent to America: he never saw them again
Stern carried out mass interrogations of members of the Volkssturm to assess their capability to fight. These were over-age men and under-age boys who had been drafted into the German army in the final stages of the war. By the end of hostilities, Stern held the rank of master-sergeant and had been awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
He was born Günther Stern, the son of Julius Stern and Hedwig (née Silberberg), at Hildesheim, Germany, on January 14 1922. He had a younger brother and sister. His father sold clothing materials and was often travelling and away from home.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the treatment of Jews became increasingly oppressive. At young Günther’s school, during a history lesson, the teacher handed out razor blades and the class had to cut out the pages in their text books indicated on the blackboard. All Jewish achievements were excised and replaced by distortions and falsehoods.
One evening, his father was putting letters in the mailbox when he was brutally beaten by a uniformed SS man. He only managed to get home with the help of a policeman.
Aged 14, young Günther was removed from high school by his father and an English tutor was hired to teach him. His Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel, who lived in St Louis, Missouri, agreed to help him get to America and become his guardians.
With the help of a consular official in Hamburg, in November 1937, Günther left Germany and embarked for New York. He never saw his family again.
After completing high school, he enrolled at St Louis University and worked as a waiter in restaurants to pay for his tuition. When America entered the Second World War, Stern was enrolled in US Army Military Intelligence.
Together with many other foreign-born GIs, he became a naturalised American citizen and formally changed his name from Günther to Guy. After several weeks of basic training at the Induction Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was posted to the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland.
With the Ritchie Boys, Stern studied enemy intelligence, uniforms, aerial maps and orders of battle. He received close combat and weapons training, as well as instruction in encoding and deciphering messages and in conducting interrogations.
After a final examination, in which he interrogated German PoWs captured in North Africa, he and his intake were taken on manoeuvres. The camp was set up on the edge of a swamp, the small tents anchored in mud. They were visited by unfriendly tarantulas and an aggressive herd of razorback pigs.
At night, their team leader, in a cosy nightshirt, stretched out comfortably in a hammock sent to him by his rich family. This infuriated Stern and his comrades who had to sleep in the mud in their underwear. Determined to avenge themselves, one morning, while their leader was at HQ, they dug a slit trench under the hammock and filled it with garbage.
Late that night, a single file of pigs led by a large hungry boar tipped the team leader out of his hammock and started rooting around in search of a midnight feast. The unfortunate man fled, crying out: “Help! The pigs are after me!”
In 1944, Stern embarked for England in a banana boat. Equipped with field glasses, he was on night watch looking out for the periscopes of U-boats. The south of England had been turned into an armed camp in preparation for D-Day. Clifton College, Bristol, had been requisitioned by the US Army and Stern was billeted in the city.
Guy Stern at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies
After the war, he visited Hildesheim and learned that his former home had been confiscated by the Nazi government and his family had been sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. He never discovered whether they had perished there or in one of the Nazi concentration camps.
He went back to New York City and, in 1948, he received a degree in Romance Languages from Hofstra University. He was up at Columbia University until 1955 and, after being awarded a doctorate, he became an assistant professor at Denison University, Ohio.
In the 1960s, he was head of the department for German language and literature at the University of Cincinnati. He was later head of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Maryland, then served as professor of German literature and cultural history at Wayne State University, Detroit, until his retirement.
Stern was the director of the Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center, Farmington Hills, near Detroit. In 2017, the French government appointed him to the Legion of Honour. He was also made an honorary citizen of Hildesheim.
He published Invisible Ink (2020), an autobiography, and several books on German literary history.
Guy Stern married, in 1948, Margith Langweiler. Their child died in infancy and they adopted a month-old son, Mark, who predeceased him. After the marriage failed, he married Judith Owens, a schoolteacher, who also predeceased him.
In 2006, he married Susanna Piontek, a Polish-born writer, whom he met in Germany and who survives him.
Guy Stern, born January 14 1922, died December 7 2023
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