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The Stories/Life in Camp Ritchie
Life in Camp Ritchie collects short statements from Bauer’s documentary about everyday training life at the Military Intelligence Training Center—how men arrived, what the camp felt like, and how interrogators practiced.
Excerpts from Christian Bauer’s film The Ritchie Boys, as published on the film site’s “Life in Camp Ritchie” page.
Arriving as “enemy aliens”
I was an alien when I was drafted in April of 1941, and then a few months later—and I was by this time a corporal in the army—I became an enemy alien.
— Rudy Michaels
Being an enemy alien and they didn’t trust me with the weapon, they put me into Camp Grant, Illinois, which is the basic training for the medical corps. … But if I was gonna fight a war, I wanted a weapon, I wanted to kill Nazis, not with a syringe. … And the next day I found myself in Camp Ritchie, Maryland—Military Intelligence Training Centre.
— Hans Spear
The gate and the “circus”
There was a big portal that said something like Military Intelligence Training Centre. Now, it struck me even then, that that’s not the way normally military intelligence advertises itself…
— Victor Brombert
Somebody changed that and made it Military Institute of Total Confusion—MITC. And that in many ways it was. It was the strangest collection of people, but I found a great number of them exceedingly pleasant.
— Werner Angress
Compared to the units I had been in before, that was a circus. But a good circus, you know, fun. … There were rumours at one time that you couldn’t get a promotion as an enlisted man … unless you had a German accent.
— Rudy Michaels
Around me, in this typically American, almost Hillbilly country, I only heard foreign accents, and I heard foreign languages.
— Victor Brombert
Why language mattered
They realized that we were more valuable than the average soldier. … You can teach somebody in six months how to handle a machine gun or to throw a hand grenade. But you cannot teach anybody in six months to be fluent in a language in order to interrogate anybody.
— Hans Spear
For us, and I think for the Ritchie Boys with that European connection, I think, it was a rebirth. We could shed and we could investigate our past and do something about it … and simultaneously do something for this fantastic country that permitted me to live.
— Fred Howard
Classmates and misfits
Sooner or later, everybody knew each other or was related to somebody that you knew, it became kind of a family thing. … I shake this bed and this head pops out from under a blanket, and here is Private First Class Joseph Bromberg, who was a childhood friend of mine in Leipzig … And here we meet, and that happened all the time at Ritchie.
— Rudy Michaels
We were intellectuals and so we were misfits really, as far as army discipline is concerned. … I wasn’t much of a soldier, I am, basically, I am an artist.
— Si Lewen
All over the place there were little groups of people talking about politics, talking about the latest gossip, talking about Europe. And they talked about philosophy also… But most of them looked very unmilitary.
— Victor Brombert
Classroom and practice
Classroom instructions were the most intense instructions I had ever had either in high school or college. … ranging from learning the Morse code to interpreting aerial photography to learning the so called German Order of Battle… And you had to memorise a good part of that Order of Battle.
— Guy Stern
We were put into the landscape at night we had to find our way, without a compass or with only a compass and no map. … So it was physical, it was technical and it was linguistic and it was often amusing also.
— Victor Brombert
German prisoners, who had been captured during the African campaign, were shipped to Camp Ritchie and they became, so to speak, our guinea pigs.
— Guy Stern
And then we interrogated each other, you know. And at first we were screaming at each other and then we realised that that’s not good enough, that that’s sometimes quite stupid.
— Fred Howard
The film narration also notes U.S. soldiers in German uniforms as sparring partners, cardboard “German” tanks that frightened nearby farmers, and a post teeming with students from seemingly every European country.