Alfred G. Meyer

Record status: unconfirmed. Class-roster match confidence is medium. Correct the infobox if you have a source, and note it on talk.

Alfred G. Meyer
Personal details
Born	5 February 1920 Bielefeld, Germany
Died	1998
Nativity	Germany
Religion	Jewish
Military service
Allegiance	United States
Branch	United States Army
ASN	0555182
Rank	Second Lieutenant
Rank at Ritchie	Technician Fourth Grade
Camp Ritchie	Class 18 (13 April – 10 June 1944)
Section	5B
Specialty	IPW (interrogation of prisoners of war)
Unit / division	MII 409-G; 29th Infantry Division
Team	MII 409-G

Full story Read more about Alfred G. Meyer in My Life as a Fish on The Stories.

Teammates

Team — MII 409-G

These are other soldiers listed on the same team roster. People moved between teams; overlapping service dates are not always documented.

Research notes on this page are compiled from the source file and later edits. They may be unverified, incomplete, or incorrect, and should not be treated as established fact. Please correct the article or add sources on the talk page. For class-roster terms, see About the data.

Sources & confidence: Treat Research notes as leads, not settled fact. Prefer NARA, the class roster, newspapers, Find a Grave, or published histories for contested claims. Mark unsourced claims with {{Needs source}}, or explain disagreements on talk. Baseline import notes: About the data.

Alfred G. Meyer (5 February 1920–1998) was a German-born Jewish refugee, Camp Ritchie interrogator, and later a scholar of Soviet politics. After Class 18 and a commission on D-Day, he served with an MII team attached to the 29th Infantry Division.

Biography

Alfred G. Meyer was born on 5 February 1920 in Bielefeld, Germany. As Nazi persecution closed in, he left for the United States in 1939 after a first sailing on the MS Donau was turned back, then crossed via Belgium and a Dutch ship and settled with relatives in Santa Ana, California.

Eager to serve, he volunteered into the draft in 1941 and entered the Army from Los Angeles (enlisted ASN 39162439). After early duty that included clerical work and an assignment to the Army Specialized Training Program’s Russian-language course at Harvard, the Army recognized his German and sent him to Camp Ritchie for prisoner-of-war interrogation training in Class 18.

At Ritchie he finished a demanding course that mixed order-of-battle study, aerial-photo work, map reading, Morse code, and field craft on a ten-day “Ban-Day” cycle. During a culminating exercise in early summer 1944 he was pulled aside for commissioning; on 6 June 1944—D-Day, and his father’s birthday—he became a second lieutenant after a counterintelligence interview cleared a mistranslated “Cuban cause” letter from his refugee efforts to help his parents. He soon sailed for Liverpool with other newly commissioned Ritchie graduates.

After months waiting at Broadway in Worcestershire, he crossed to Omaha Beach and was assigned in the Paris area to an intelligence team under Capt. Hans Kohler with four other Camp Ritchie graduates, then joined the 29th Infantry Division. In the field he developed a deliberately humane interrogation style and a “show of knowledge” technique drawn from Ritchie training. Roster research places him with MII Team 409-G with that division.

After the war Meyer entered Harvard graduate study under the GI Bill, earned a doctorate, and became a scholar of Marxism and Soviet politics. He died in 1998. Longer Camp Ritchie and wartime passages from his autobiography are on The Stories/My Life as a Fish.

Research notes

• Scholar of Communism / Marxism (postwar academic career)
• ASTP Russian at Harvard before Camp Ritchie

Gallery

After you are autoconfirmed, upload a photo and add [[File:Example.jpg|thumb|caption]] here, or set |photo=Example.jpg in the infobox.

Technical record

Field	Imported value
Approx Age at Death	78
Class_ASN	39162439
Class_Name	MEYER, Alfred G.
match_method	pass2_unique_name
row_source	both

Timeline

• 5 February 1920 — Born in Bielefeld, Germany (Jewish).
• 1939 — Emigrated to the United States after a first sailing was turned back; settled in Santa Ana, California.
• 1941 — Volunteered into the draft; entered the Army from Los Angeles as a private (ASN 39162439).
• Assigned to the ASTP Russian-language program at Harvard University.
• Entered Camp Ritchie Class 18 for IPW / military-intelligence training.
• 6 June 1944 — Commissioned second lieutenant at Camp Ritchie (D-Day).
• Summer 1944 — Sailed to Liverpool; staged at Broadway, Worcestershire.
• September 1944 — Crossed to Omaha Beach; assigned to Capt. Hans Kohler’s intelligence team (four other Ritchie graduates) with the 29th Infantry Division; roster: MII 409-G.
• 1944–1945 — Interrogation and related intelligence duty with the 29th Infantry Division in Northwest Europe.
• 1946 — Began graduate study at Harvard; later scholar of Soviet politics / Marxism.
• 1998 — Died.
• 2000 — Autobiography My Life as a Fish (excerpts concerning Camp Ritchie later shared by his daughter Vera Meyer).

Sources

• Camp Ritchie Museum, Inc. (The Ritchie History Museum), Classes 1–31 roster data
• Dan Gross research spreadsheets, including original Excel timeline/roster work, combined with other research and records
• NARA World War II Army enlistment records (where a NARA ASN is present)
• 1940 U.S. Census (where a census match is present)
• Dan Gross, Timeline of Alfred G. Meyer for Camp Ritchie (private research document; 1 source documents reviewed)
• Dan Gross, Timeline of Meyer, Alfred G. for Camp Ritchie (private research files; selected non-private narrative findings; 1 source files: ALFRED G. MEYER.doc)
• Chapter 3 excerpt PDF (Camp Ritchie) — My Life as a Fish, © 2000 Alfred G. Meyer
• Chapter 4 excerpt PDF (Europe) — My Life as a Fish, © 2000 Alfred G. Meyer
• Chapter 5 excerpt PDF (postwar) — My Life as a Fish, © 2000 Alfred G. Meyer