The Ritchie Boys

[first lines]

title cards:
Between 1933 and 1939, countless Germans, Austrians, and Czechoslovakians flee their home countries. For them, a visa to the United States is the most valuable document in the world.

Guy Stern:
I emigrated to America in October 1939. Germany permitted people like myself to leave, provided you didn't have very much. We arrived in New York with $3 - my mother had $3 and I had $3. America was a fantasy at that point, which turned out to be a reality.

Guy Stern:
[lecturing] Who were the first ones who did any stock-taking of what was emerging unique in literary history abroad? Because, if you look at the tradition of literature...

Guy Stern:
I first tried to enlist in 1942 in the Intelligence Service of the Navy. And they told me that they only would take native-born Americans. A couple of months later I was inducted into the US Army, and after my basic training, as Camp Barkley, Texas, I was transferred to the US Military Intelligence Training Center, at Camp Ritchie, Maryland.

Guy Stern:
[lecturing] You must remember I'm driven out of Germany as well. And I came out of the Army in 1945, and enrolled at Columbia in German Department.

Guy Stern:
I was going to be part of this war, oh absolutely. I felt rage at what happened to Europe. I felt rage what happened to Jews. Europe was raped by a very powerful, well disciplined, well oiled, military machine.

Narrator:
This is the story of a group of young men in World War II. Many of them Jewish-German refugees. They escape the Nazis and found a new home in America. They knew the language and the psychology of the enemy better than anybody else. Fighting fascism was their goal. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland they prepared for their own kind of war.

Hans Spear:
I make no dispersions to the medics, they're the bravest of the brave. They go under fire without a weapon to help a fallen comrade. But if I was going to fight a war, I wanted a weapon. I wanted to kill Nazis, not with a syringe.