The Ritchie Boys

Christian Bauer's WWII documentary The Ritchie Boys tells the interesting story of an unlikely group of refugees who became wartime heroes by turning the tables on the Nazi regime that forced them into exile. The eponymous group (some 10,000 in all) of young German Jewish men, who were able to reach a safe haven in America before the country went to war, all hailed from intellectual and artistic backgrounds. Although the men hardly seemed ideal candidates for interrogating captured enemy agents, the U.S. government recognized that these men understood the culture and mindset of the German people and thus recruited them into service, initially stationing them at the Military Intelligence Training Center in Fort Ritchie, MD, before sending the lads back to their native homeland as part of the Allied force (some parachuted into Europe during the D-Day invasion). The surviving veterans offer compelling stories of their wartime years, accounts that serve as fascinating and harrowing reminders of the evil of Nazism and the less-deadly but still considerable anti-Semitism found on this side of the Atlantic during the 1940s. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)