Brombert, Victor Henri (32906913): Difference between revisions

'''Victor Henri Brombert''' (né Bromberg; 11 November 1923–26 November 2024) was a Berlin-born U.S. Army interrogator associated with [[Camp Ritchie]]. He trained with [[:Category:Class 11|Class 11]], landed at Omaha Beach with [[Team MII 423|MII 423]] and the 2nd Armored Division, later served with [[Team MII 438-G|MII 438-G]] and the 28th Infantry Division, and after the war became Princeton's Henry Putnam University Professor of literature.

Victor Henri Brombert was born Victor Henri Bromberg in Berlin on 11 November 1923 into a well-to-do Russian-Jewish family that had fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Germany. As a child he saw street fighting between Nazis and Communists, once while out with his nanny. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the family moved to France. Paris became his home; he attended the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and later said he felt very French. In 1940, as the German army advanced, they fled the occupied zone across the Pyrenees into Spain. In 1941 he and his parents reached New York on a banana freighter after a six-week crossing that zigzagged to avoid U-boats. The ship carried some 1,200 refugees in space meant for a handful of passengers. Brombert later said they were "the bananas in the hold," with dysentery and deaths aboard; the press called the vessel a floating concentration camp.

The Army drafted him in May 1943 in New York while he was not yet a citizen. Classified as an alien, he was at first barred from carrying a weapon and put with the medics, drilling as a litter bearer. He became a United States citizen that September and, during service, changed his surname from Bromberg to Brombert. Fluent in French, German, and Russian, he was sent to [[Camp Ritchie]]. Brombert trained as an interrogator with [[:Category:Class 11|Class 11]] (IPW Ge) and later called the post his first university. The trainees, he said, did not look like soldiers but knew Piero della Francesca and Mozart; the course covered German and Italian order of battle, aerial photographs, night navigation without a compass, interrogation, liaison with the French Resistance, and sentinel-neutralization techniques he never used in the field.

He crossed to England with the 2nd Armored Division and landed in Normandy about two days after D-Day at Omaha Beach with [[Team MII 423|MII Team 423]]. The work was tactical: minefields, machine-gun nests, tank reserves, and troop positions, checked against prisoners and civilians who were often frightened or confused. He later described the Normandy beaches, burned tank crews, and the bombing around Saint-Lô as a lunar landscape. After a night under fire on the bluffs above Omaha Beach, he told himself that if he survived he would not complain, would try to give pleasure to others, and would win the war without loving it. Brombert fought in France and was in Paris at the liberation. He later served with [[Team MII 438-G|MII 438-G]] and the 28th Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest and during the Battle of the Bulge. He offered cigarettes and avoided threats in interrogation, except with hardened SS men.

After Germany's surrender he worked as an interpreter and interrogator on denazification in Germany. He found Germans reluctant to denounce one another. Occupation authorities sometimes left Nazi officials in place to keep cities running, a compromise he later described with frustration. He also saw displaced-persons camps: German refugees from the east, and Jewish survivors who returned to find their houses occupied, some of them shot at when they tried to reclaim a home. He left the Army at the end of 1946.

Brombert studied at Yale University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in Romance languages and literatures in 1953; a Fulbright fellowship in Rome in 1950–51 added Italian to his languages. He married the translator and biographer Beth Archer in 1950. He joined Yale's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, chaired it from 1964 to 1973, and was named Benjamin F. Barge Professor in 1968. In 1975 he moved to Princeton as Henry Putnam University Professor in comparative literature and Romance languages, where he also directed the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism and chaired the Council of the Humanities; he became emeritus in 1999. He taught as a visiting professor at universities including Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and the Collège de France, and served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1988–89. His honors included two Guggenheim fellowships, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974) and the American Philosophical Society (1987), Yale's Wilbur Cross Medal (1985), and appointment as Commandeur des Palmes Académiques (2008) and Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (2009). For decades he kept wartime service out of the classroom—he was supposed to talk about Stendhal, he later said, not about the war—and students learned of it only years afterward; in 2021, at 97, he was among the surviving Ritchie Boys featured on ''60 Minutes''. His memoir ''Trains of Thought'' appeared in 2002. He died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on 26 November 2024, at the age of 101.

* 1940 — Family fled occupied France across the Pyrenees into Spain.

* May 1943 — Drafted in New York as a non-citizen; first assigned to the medics as a litter bearer.

* 9 September 1943 — Became a United States citizen.

* Summer 1944 — Later described the bombing around Saint-Lô.

* Fall 1944 — Served with the 28th Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest.

* 1948 — Bachelor's degree, Yale University.

* 1953 — Doctorate in Romance languages and literatures, Yale.

* 1964–1973 — Chaired Yale's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.