Dr. Stern was 15 when his mother and father despatched him by himself to dwell with an uncle within the United States. They hoped to affix him, and to convey their two youthful kids. But the “golden door was not wide open,” Dr. Stern later stated, describing the reception that awaited many refugees throughout World War II.
In the top, his household remained trapped in Germany, and Dr. Stern alone amongst them survived the Holocaust. He was 101 when he died on Dec. 7 at a hospital in West Bloomfield, Mich.
He by no means forgot his father’s phrases about invisible ink. They have been a warning, but additionally a promise — that “better times” would come, and that after they did, Dr. Stern would depart a mark.
He did, first as one of many “Ritchie Boys” recruited to a secret U.S. navy intelligence program that helped defeat Nazi Germany, and later, after the battle, as a professor of German literature and tradition, his consideration ever tuned to the tales of exiles and immigrants.
In current a long time, Dr. Stern drew the curiosity of historians, documentarians, college students and students searching for to be taught and protect the historical past of the Holocaust.
He appeared within the 2004 movie “The Ritchie Boys,” a documentary in regards to the males — and ladies — so named for his or her coaching at Camp Ritchie, Md. Of the 20,000 troopers of their ranks, a number of thousand have been Jewish refugees of Nazi Europe whose linguistic abilities proved very important to U.S. interrogation and intelligence-gathering through the battle.
Dr. Stern additionally was featured prominently in “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the three-part documentary directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein that aired final 12 months on PBS.
“We were at the tail end of the window of time,” Novick stated in an interview, “when it would be possible to find people who remembered this history from living it.”
Günther Stern was born on Jan. 14, 1922, in Hildesheim, in northern Germany. His father was a touring textile salesman, and his mom assisted him in his work whereas elevating Dr. Stern, his brother and his sister.
Dr. Stern turned 11 two weeks earlier than Hitler grew to become chancellor in 1933. As the Nazi regime intensified its marketing campaign of antisemitic persecution, his father misplaced a lot of his enterprise, and Jewish college students at Dr. Stern’s college have been bullied and attacked.
His mother and father resolved to go away Germany and determined that, because the oldest little one, Dr. Stern would go first. With assist from a Jewish support group within the United States and an uncle in St. Louis, the household managed to rearrange for him — however solely him — to sail to America in 1937.
Dr. Stern tried to lift the funds to convey his mother and father and siblings to the United States, however the bureaucratic morass proved impenetrable. The final letter he obtained from them, in 1942, knowledgeable him that that they had been deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. He by no means realized in the event that they died there or in a Nazi dying camp.
Dr. Stern accomplished highschool in St. Louis and was drafted into the Army in 1943. He was chosen for the navy intelligence college at Camp Ritchie due to his fluency in German.
The “Ritchie Boys” — a reputation they acquired lengthy after the battle — educated in areas together with interrogation, aerial reconnaissance, counterintelligence and psychological warfare.
By the top of the battle, greater than 60 % of the “actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield” was collected by their members, David Frey, the founding director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies on the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., informed the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2021.
“We were fighting an American war, and we were also fighting an intensely personal war,” Dr. Stern mirrored years later. “We were in that war with every inch of our being.”
Dr. Stern landed in Normandy three days after the D-Day invasion in June 1944. He served in France, Belgium and Germany and was credited with interrogating hundreds of German prisoners through the battle.
Dr. Stern typically teamed with a fellow soldier throughout interrogations in a good-cop-bad-cop routine. Playing the “bad cop,” Dr. Stern posed as a Soviet official — one Commissar Krukov, full with uniform, medals and a convincing Russian accent — to stoke fears in tight-lipped POWs that they is likely to be despatched to a Soviet gulag in the event that they did not cooperate.
Dr. Stern, who reached the rank of grasp sergeant, obtained the Bronze Star Medal for his service through the battle, with a quotation that credited him with offering info of “inestimable value.”
In one occasion, he interrogated a German corporal who revealed the deaths of two Americans POWs who had been chosen by their Nazi captors for execution as a result of they have been Jewish refugees of Germany.
Dr. Stern’s report on the interrogation helped result in a battle crimes investigation and the execution of the perpetrator quickly after the battle, in line with Stephen Goodell, a retired director of exhibitions on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and a scholar of the Ritchie Boys.
Dr. Stern entered Buchenwald, the Nazi focus camp in Germany, days after it was liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945. Gazing upon the skeletal survivors, he slipped a couple of paces behind a fellow soldier in order that the person wouldn’t see him crying. But when that soldier seemed again to search out him, Dr. Stern noticed that he, too, was weeping.
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Stern returned to Hildesheim and located town decreased to rubble. An previous buddy informed him of his household’s deportation.
“I felt as though an axe had severed me from my roots,” Dr. Stern later wrote. “My assumptions or dreams about my future life had been illusions. I held on to what little was left.”
Dr. Stern stated that all through his life, he felt a accountability to exhibit that he had been worthy of survival. He studied Romance languages at Hofstra University on Long Island, from which he graduated in 1948. At Columbia University, he obtained a grasp’s diploma in 1950 and a PhD in 1954, each in German.
He taught at Denison University and the University of Cincinnati, each in Ohio, and on the University of Maryland earlier than becoming a member of Wayne State University in 1978. During a quarter-century on the college, he served as provost, senior vice chairman for educational affairs, and professor of German literature and cultural historical past.
He traced his curiosity in German literature to his mother and father, who had typically taken him to the theater in Hildesheim.
“My parents, had they been allowed to live, would have been elated by my choice of career and their catalytic role in it,” he wrote in his memoir, “Invisible Ink,” revealed in 2020.
“That saddens me, of course, but that regret is as nothing compared to my torment when I imagine how they, lovers of the German language, probably heard it in its most debased form in the moments before their deaths at the hands of their murderers.”
Citing the phrases of a buddy, Dr. Stern wrote, “I hate the language that I love.”
Dr. Stern’s marriage to Margith Langweiler led to divorce. Their son, Mark Stern, died in 2006. Dr. Stern’s second spouse, Judith Edelstein Owens, died in 2003 after 23 years of marriage.
Susanna Piontek of West Bloomfield, Dr. Stern’s spouse of 17 years, was his solely rapid survivor. She confirmed his dying however didn’t cite a trigger.
Dr. Stern labored for years with the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Mich., the place he was a member of the board and, till his dying, director of the International Institute of the Righteous.
He spoke continuously to the general public about his time as a refugee, his incapacity to save lots of his household and his service with the Ritchie Boys — recollections, he as soon as remarked, that had lengthy been “sequestered in secret chambers of our hearts and minds.”
“We have seen the nadir of human behavior, and we have no guarantee that it won’t recur,” Dr. Stern stated in a closing sequence of “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” “If we can make that clear and graphic, and understandable, not as something to imitate, but as a warning of what can happen to human beings, then, perhaps, we have one shield against its recurrence.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/12/13/guy-stern-holocaust-ritchie-boys/