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America, The Army and Camp Ritchie

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How were you able to get to America?

That's a good question. I took an old calendar and found a boat that went from San Francisco to Costa Rica and bought the ticket in the war in Europe so I would not depend in the Romania I went to cuk ragon lee, and I said I want the ticket. they said; well we don't know and I said "well here is the plan give me this ticket. I need it in order to get permission to travel and they gave it to me. and I bought the ticket and paid for it and I used it.

How did you get the money for the ticket?

How I got the money? Now you ask a very strange question because I really don't know, we always had money. When I came here in the 1940s I suddenly found that nobody had money. you could buy for one nickel a breakfast at Needicks at the corner: orange juice toast jam and butter and coffee for a nickel. And nobody had any money it was in the middle of the depression here. it was a very poor country. only after the war the development started to come. so a war is not always bad it isn't the best of things. it is always conducive to progress. airplanes came after the war, TV came after the war. we had gramophone that you had to clink up in order to hear a record played. In 1925 I remember that radio started. but life was different you know. the benefit came after the war

What were your impressions of President Roosevelt?

I liked him very much. a lot more than I like him today. because at the time, he was a hero. we all looked up to him. and we listed to his fireside speeches. not because he was a democrat but because he was President Roosevelt. he had a little particular attraction to everybody. he was very wise; his wife was even wiser. Eleanor was a great lady and I wish we had such a president again.

Why has your perception of him changed?

Things came out that we didn't know. We didn't know he had a mistress, we didn't know he had a knowledge of concentration camps that he didn't make public. In the beginning of the war in 1940 and '41, this country was not for the war. President Roosevelt won everybody over by giving land lease to the British. You see the British stood alone against Hitler. All the other countries were occupied and French people like Pétain had taken over the French Republic and you see, these were kingdoms. You have to understand that there is a big difference between a country that has a president for four years and after 4 years if we don't like them, we send them home. Nobody talks about them anymore, but who still speaks about Clinton? Very few people. And that there was only a few years, you see.

In Europe that isn't so, the king was there and everyone wanted to live like a king. You were educated to come as close as possible to come as close as possible to the manners of a king. The king was not elected, he was inherited. In England at the time, there was not much talk about the King of England who was Edward the 8th who married Mrs. Simpson as an excuse was really a friend of the Germans and they wanted to get rid of him so they put this story out that he was in love with this woman and he married her and gave up his throne, but he was really forced to give up his throne. The other politicians didn't want him. Churchill particularly didn't want him. Churchill at that time was really the hero of all straight thinking people. He not only spoke a very fine English, but he said phrases like, "We shall fight on the rooftops and fight on the strands, but we shall never surrender!" And Churchill became a big hero until the end of the war and then they voted him out. So it's not always rewarding to be such a great leader in the war time.

I understand that Camp Ritchie eventually became a military intelligence camp. Were you involved in that?

That was my camp.

Were you involved with the actual military intelligence part or did you stay there before became the military intelligence?

It was immediately an intelligence camp.

Tell us about that experience in the camp.

As I told you, I got there as a French teacher and was respected by everybody because my French was very good. This camp had no typewriters. This camp had no typewriters because in the middle of the war everything was made for war equipment so typewriters were not made. I told that to the officer and he gave me right away a three-day pass and my family said, "Is the war over? You came home?" I came to pick up my typewriter. And with this typewriter I made a career. In fact I gave it as a gift at the end of the war to the museum in Ritchie. Everybody wanted my because of that typewriter. Slowly I moved up to be the camp commander, secretary.

There was a newspaper in Washington called the Washington Merry-Go-Round, it was Pearson. Pearson wrote up the story of this camp in the newspapers. Here is a colonel, he is the son in law of the colonel Strawner who is the head of the G2 intelligence of America and he's collecting people and they called in a cattle load. From one day to the next we were all shipped out. When we were there it was sort of like a summer camp.

We created something. We taught the languages, for instance French, was taught to those officers who were going to land in North Africa, that was prepared ahead of time and they didn't speak French. So in order to be able to communicate right away, we gave a course. That is what my function was in Ritchie. And prepared us to know the armies of all the other countries. We learned how their officers were equipped and what kind of signals they had on their sleeves and all that so that we could recognize them when afterwards when we landed in Normandy. But camp Ritchie as such was a very great experience because I've met not only all these wonderful people but it also gave us time to reflect on the war and to give our best in order to win this war. That was Patton's strength. Patton's strength was "We are going to win this war!"

Also, in the invasion of Normandy did you.... after the actual invasion?

Yes. On the sixteenth day after the invasion. But the boats were the same. There was the landing boats that opened up from the front and we had to run to the country. In fact, in the middle of the night, it was raining like hell and we were all put onto trucks and they unloaded us in St. Lo. St. Lo was one of the big battles that we had won already previous to my arrival. And when I woke up in the morning I saw that I had been sleeping on a dead cow that was in the hedges.

Quickly after that we reached Paris, we took Paris. Then I went to look for Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein was an American and a writer from San Francisco. She lived in Paris. She was the friend of Hemingway and all those Americans that lived in Paris at the time, all the painters. And she created Picasso, because she had some money. She bought the first paintings that Picasso made, and also Matisse. With her brother Leo, they collected. Americans didn't know so much about art in that time. French art in particular. So as soon as we took Paris I went to look for her, I knew her address. We gave her food, chocolate, and cigars. She again started a salón; every Saturday night, she would receive American soldiers in her apartment, and by the time that she had collected some of these Picasso's that you see today in all the great museums, they were hanging in her apartment.

As a matter of fact on my honeymoon with my wife, Gertrude had died already, but Annie Stulplez, her girlfriend had remained in the apartment with all these wonderful, million dollar paintings, that the old little lady was allowed to keep until she died. Gertrude Stein, she wrote a very funny phrase of "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," because she wanted to imitate the painters, modern painters. So she wrote plays that you may have seen, I don't know if any of you know Gertrude Stein here? You do? Now you will. She deserves to be looked into.

You said you "took Paris." Can you describe what your involvement was in taking Paris, and what does that mean?

The American army took Paris. In fact, we didn't. We were very elegant and we waited and we allowed General Karnack to go ahead with his free French army. It should be known in history that the Americans took Paris. The French were allowed to get ahead of us and we waited outside of Paris allowed them very elegantly to take over and then came in. the goal was not the favorite of Churchill , Roosevelt or any other politician. the goal was very demanding. France is a big country France is a great contributor who gave the revolution we did this we did that and Churchill said I have one cross there which was the cross of Loren. however we chose General Karnack instead of the goal to go as a reward and our function was then as American soldiers to take over the city. we had a office and we would prepare the rest of the battles. from there we went on to Germany.

What was your personal role that you played in the military after landing in France?

We interrogated prisoners at army level, they had already gone through regiment division, or they had to know something. They were screened. each prisoner was asked what their function was for example if they said that they were secretary to such and such, that was the kind of person, a bartender they looked for that overheard conversations between army generals, professions like that. we got mostly well informed people on third army headquarters there was already a level of intelligence that we met up with.

So essentially you got the final answer?

Once there were interrogated by us they then were sent to a camp and disposed of in some way or the other. Not to be killed but some of them were sent to work in America, some in other countries. We had so many prisoners at certain moments but in the end half of Germany were our prisoners! I have pictures of carriages and carriages full of people that the Germans gave up. At one moment there was no more war. But we then pursued to prepare the Nuremberg trials and we wanted people that could witness against others and sign statements saying this and this man did this and that and that's how we sort of got informed.

Because we spoke the language like they did they were not quiet often realizing that they were giving away a lot of secrets at one moment one prisoner told us that every day at 12 o'clock the head of the German army is sitting under such and such a bridge and eats his lunch. We waited for the next day and sent our air force and got him and photographed afterwards and published this so that Americans should know if you say something, it can have consequences. the consequences were very bad for them, but that is was the function was of interrogation.

What were some other examples of some very interesting stories that you learned while interrogating?

There were many stories. not all were bad. some were very nice. I'll tell you a story. An American sanitation man helped a German back into his lines because he was wounded. that's the law in war, that if you are a sanitation man you bring back the person into...and they forgot to put a band over his eyes, so they kept him. the American soldier from Chicago, blond with blue eyes, 20 years old... and we took him back the next battle; and those are the prisoners that we liked to interview because they had direct contact with.

This young German told us one evening we had him... the American... he told us that was very well-protected by a certain German by the name of Singer. And that day I had seen in the lists the name Singer. So I went outside the camp and got the German soldier and brought him in and confronted the American with each other. they were very surprised to see... he says "what are you doing here?" And we gave this German chocolate and cigarettes because he had behaved so nicely to this young man. and when I took him back, not before, but when I took him back, he said to me "you know, this young man was Jewish and I did not betray him to the Germans." And he himself was a German. So you see you can find here and there one German who was decent enough to help this man and we gave him back the help. That's just one story.

Were you close with any of the people who actually had to go land during the invasion?

No. I mean, we were all close... the Germans had air, you know, and our camp was PW, prisoners of war, illuminated every night according to the Geneva Convention, so they knew that they bombed sometimes their own, they knew we had the prisoners. And sometimes, before me, the group that I afterwards belonged to had been bombed out. But sixteen days after we were already past St. Lo, we really had already quite established a foothold in Europe. And it was not that they were hiding in the hedges. By bad luck, if a German had shot at me, there was nothing I could have done.

Were you friends with anyone who actually was in combat at Omaha Beach?

I was at Omaha Beach myself, sixteen days after the invasion.

Were you friends with anyone who went and fought in the invasion?

Not that I remember in particular. I know that some boys that had been with me in Ritchie were killed. Very few, but they happened to have been assigned as translators at the regiment. If you're in 3rd Army headquarters, you don't get in touch with the, with the average person, you see. Whereas, if you were in regiment or division, you had to confront soldiers immediately. There was a group that was killed in their own. We all had cars, we were allowed to, you know,—I was allowed to do anything I wanted in the section that belonged to the 3rd Army.

 

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