Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  A sleepy-looking man in a dressing gown answered the door.

  “Your name Angress?” the man asked.

  Taken aback, Werner could only nod.

  The man said that a woman named Henny Angress had come to the door the day before. “She said if her son from the United States showed up, I was to give you her new address.”

  Werner found the address a few blocks away. When his mother opened the door, she looked at him and nearly collapsed, shrieking and sobbing. He hugged and consoled her even as her appearance frightened him. In the six years since he had seen her, she had lost forty or fifty pounds, and she was so wobbly she could hardly walk. She introduced him to the people she was staying with, explaining that they had all just emerged from underground hiding places. They all looked as malnourished as his mother.

  Werner hurried out to the jeep and bought in armfuls of K-rations, distributing them with the warning to eat slowly and in small doses. The family offered to share the salad they had been eating, which Werner declined. It looked to be grass they must have picked from the front yard.

  Henny told Werner that his brothers were staying nearby, and she was expecting them any minute. She explained that the three of them, after avoiding earlier deportations, had gone underground in September 1943 after the Nazis had ordered that the Jews remaining in Amsterdam were to report the next day to the train yard. Henny and the two boys had survived with the aid of the well-organized Dutch resistance movement, whose members had risked arrest, and even execution, whenever the Nazis had discovered them harboring Jews.

  When Werner asked about his father, his mother said he had not returned to Holland. In her last letter, she had written that Papa had been arrested for breaking currency laws and taken to Berlin, where he was tried and convicted for smuggling the family’s life savings out of Germany. He had been sentenced to Brandenburg Prison. She told him that her sister, Margot, who had married an Aryan and had stayed in Berlin during the war, had written to her just before she and the boys went into hiding. Her letter said that Papa had been released from prison in late 1942, but that he had been sent directly to Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother said she hoped he would be returning to them soon.

  Werner knew more about Auschwitz and the Nazi death camps than his mother, but he decided to keep this from her, for now. Still, he knew what this most likely meant for his gentle and upstanding father, and it hit Werner in the gut. He knew it would be too much for her to bear right now. Henny eventually turned to the Red Cross for help in locating her missing husband. After a lengthy delay, they informed her that he was no longer alive.

  Henny Angress lived until age ninety-three, but not long enough to discover the full truth about her husband’s fate. Werner took up the task, and in the 1990s a researcher found his father’s file in the Berlin Landesarchiv (state archives). Documents revealed that after his release from Brandenburg and transport to Auschwitz, Ernst Angress died there on January 19, 1943. An attachment from the Auschwitz Standesamt (registry office) contained this note: “The Jew Angress died of heart failure.” Heart failure and ordinary diseases were commonly listed as official causes of death at Auschwitz, where the SS camp administrators never reported that a single person was gassed to death.

  When Werner’s brothers showed up, the boys’ reunion was tinged with the disappointment of not having their father with them, but they were joyous to have found each other. Fritz and Hans were amazed to see Werner in Amsterdam so soon after the end of the war and in the uniform of a U.S. Army paratrooper. Hans, sixteen, carried a crumpled bunch of just-picked wildflowers he handed to their mother on her special day.

  It was Sunday, May 13. Mother’s Day.

  Werner Angress reunited with his brothers, Hans and Fritz, and his mother in Amsterdam on Mother’s Day 1945. (Family photograph)

  Dramatis Personae

  Werner Angress, 82nd Airborne Division. Werner declined a commission in the U.S. Army so he could leave Germany and the war behind as soon as possible. He returned to the United States, where Wesleyan University, not bothered that he had quit school in Germany after eighth grade, accepted him as a student. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in history and earned a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He taught modern European history at Wesleyan, Berkeley, and SUNY Stony Brook. The author of many articles and four books, including a memoir, Witness to the Storm: A Jewish Journey from Nazi Berlin to the 82nd Airborne, he served on the Board of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of History and Culture of German-Speaking Jewry for three decades.

  After believing as a young soldier in 1945 that Germany had “forfeited its right to exist as a state,” Werner retired to his hometown of Berlin in 1988. One of the few Ritchie Boys to return to live in Germany, he spent his remaining years in the country that had given him the best and worst of memories. He visited German schools and recounted for the students what it was like to grow up Jewish under the Third Reich, and the lessons he learned during the fight against fascism.

  Werner died in Berlin, the city of his birth, in 2010 at age ninety.

  Victor Brombert, 2nd Armored Division and 28th Infantry Division. After the war, Victor learned that his aunt Anya, who had gone missing after a roundup of foreign Jews in Nice, had died in Auschwitz. So had his summertime love, Dany Wolf, along with her young child.

  He returned to the United States and studied at Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures and was appointed to the faculty. He rose to become chairman of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. In 1975, he accepted an appointment at Princeton University as professor of comparative and romance literatures. The author of fifteen books of literary criticism, as well as a memoir, Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth, he served as president of the Modern Language Association of America. In 2008, Victor was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, for his role in the liberation of that country during World War II.

  Together with his wife, Beth, an author of several historical biographies, Victor maintains a home in Princeton as well as a pied-à-terre in his beloved Paris and a summer residence in the Chianti region of Tuscany.

  “Being a Ritchie Boy was important to us all,” Victor recalls. “It gave us a sense of meaningful activity in a just war that in one way or another connected with our personal lives and experiences. The men on the teams were bright, available, not always expert warriors by a long shot, but certainly our hearts were in everything we did.”

  Victor retired in 1999 after fifty years of teaching. He continues to publish and lecture in the United States and Europe.

  Stephan Lewy, 6th Armored Division. After his return from the war, Stephan went to night school to earn his high school diploma, then to Northeastern University for a business degree. He eventually became a CPA and spent most of his career working in finance for two large hotel chains. He and his wife, Frances, had two children.

  Stephan learned only decades after the war that just months after he joined his parents in America in 1942, the OSE home at Chabannes in France was raided by pro-Nazi gendarmes, who arrived with a list of young Jews considered old enough for arrest and deportation. Stephan knew that his name was likely on that list. Among those taken were Marjan Sztrum, the eighteen-year-old banjo player in the Chabannes band and talented artist who had painted a fresco on the dining room wall depicting a farmer on a tractor. He was killed at Auschwitz.

  Stephan didn’t return to Germany until the 1990s, and then only with trepidation. In Berlin, he passed by the site of the Auerbach Orphanage, where he had spent half of his first fourteen years. The orphanage had been forcibly shut down by the Nazis in 1942. A sign in front memorialized the more than one hundred Jewish children, along with twelve teachers, who were deported and murdered that year.

  Stephan retired in 1991 in Manchester, New Hamphire, and three years later saw the movie Schindler’s List, which inspired him to begin talking for the first time about his experiences under the Nazi
s. Encouraged by a teacher friend to speak to her class, he found it therapeutic, even when answering one of the first questions asked by a young student: “Are you like a cat with nine lives?” He has since spoken to more than twenty-eight thousand schoolchildren. “When I look into their faces as they listen to my story,” he says, “I have hope that I can make a difference. My story shows what can happen if people do not act. Perhaps if enough people hear these stories, history will not repeat itself. I only hope the world has learned a lesson.”

  A widower since his wife’s death in 2010, Stephan lives in Williamville, New York.

  Martin Selling, 35th Infantry Division. After the war, Martin studied engineering under the GI Bill. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey in 1949 with a degree in mechanical engineering, and received an M.S. in industrial management three years later. He married Hilde (Kaufmann), who had emigrated from Germany in 1938 with her parents. They had two children. Martin spent most of his career with AT&T Bell Laboratories. He stayed active in the U.S. Army Reserves, from which he retired in 1978 as a lieutenant colonel.

  In 1965, he took his family to Germany to visit his hometown of Lehrberg, where he discovered that the name of his uncle Ignatz, his father’s older brother who was killed in action in World War I, had been chiseled off the town’s war memorial during the Nazi era along with other Jewish names. Then they stopped at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. He had intended to show his children where he had been held, where so many Jews had died. But the camp looked sterile and deserted, and it was filled with too many ghosts for Martin, who became so overcome with emotion that they had to leave. “We Jews were undoubtedly the major victims of the Nazi regime,” he told his family, “but there were others.” He well remembered all those he had met in Dachau who had little or no chance of getting out.

  Martin’s memoir, With Rancor and Compassion: The Memoirs of a Jew Who Thought He Was a German, was published in 2003. About his days as a Ritchie Boy, he observed: “We immigrant newcomers were proud of the contribution we provided in the war effort, although it was not known about or greatly appreciated by many Americans. Even if we were only small pieces in an elaborate jigsaw puzzle that had to be assembled in order to win the war, we German-speaking refugees were like ‘natural resources’ in America’s fight against Hitler and the Nazis.”

  Martin died in 2004 at age eighty-six.

  Manny Steinfeld, 82nd Airborne Division. In May 1945, Manny returned to his hometown of Josbach to try to find out what had happened to his sister, Irma, and widowed mother, Paula, whose last letter in fall 1941 cited rumors of their pending deportation. When Manny arrived, none of Josbach’s six Jewish families were left. A neighbor said his mother and sister had been “resettled” in late 1941 and knew nothing more.

  In December 1945, after his return to the United States, he received a letter from Palestine telling him that his younger brother, Herbert, along with several other Jewish settlers, had been shot and killed by British soldiers who had received reports that they were harboring fighters against British rule. Manny was devastated. His mother had sent his brother to Palestine a few months after she had gotten Manny out of Germany. He wondered, Was there no place on earth safe for Jews?

  It took years for Manny to learn where and how his mother and sister had died. After their deportation to the Riga ghetto in Latvia, he found out they had been sent to Stutthof concentration camp. In 2001, he visited the Stutthof Memorial Museum. The Nazis kept meticulous records of all the inmates, and Manny discovered in the camp archives that his mother and sister arrived from Riga on October 1, 1944; his mother died on December 30, 1944, and his sister died ten days later. The cause of death for both was listed as “heart failure,” which was on nearly every death record. Even after extermination by gassing began at Stutthof in June 1944, the records never reported that as the cause of death.

  On the same trip, he returned to Ludwigslust, where he saw that the wooden markers on the two hundred graves of the Wöbbelin concentration camp victims were gone. He was told they had been used as firewood during one frigid winter. The mayor said they had been raising money to replace them. Manny asked how much more they needed and wrote a check for the balance. He later went back for the rededication ceremony of the Ludwigslust cemetery.

  Manny and his wife, Fern (Goldman), raised a family in Chicago, where he became a successful furniture manufacturer. Now retired in Florida, he says, “Sometimes I wonder if I should have been a Nazi hunter instead of a furniture manufacturer. I still have a difficult time whenever I think about how many people died. The Nazis tried to wipe out my family. I am the sole survivor. But I have thirteen descendants, and that’s not too bad.”

  Guy Stern, First Army Headquarters. After the war, Guy moved to New York City. After receiving his B.A. degree at Hofstra University and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia, he became a professor of German studies, intent on separating the “gold of German culture from the dirt and toxin of the Nazi years.” He became a scholar of exile literature and the writings of those who perished in concentration camps. For the next fifty years, he taught at Columbia University, Denison University, the University of Cincinnati, and Wayne State University, where he remains a distinguished professor emeritus. Guy is currently director of the Henry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Campus in Farmington Hills, Michigan. He was married to Judith, a schoolteacher, who died in 2003. He is now married to Susanna Piontek, a German short story writer and poet forty years his junior. They live in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

  Guy returned to his hometown of Hildesheim in the 1960s to speak at the dedication of a new synagogue. He found the Thousand-Year Rose flourishing once again, climbing up the wall of a new cathedral that had replaced the one leveled by bombs in 1945. The parts of the world’s oldest rosebush above ground had been destroyed, but the roots remained alive under the ruins.

  In 2012, Guy was accorded the rights of an honorary citizen of Hildesheim in recognition of his “conciliatory efforts and for the dialogue between the religions and cultures.” A plaque was placed in front of where his family had once lived, stating: “The Jewish family Stern lived here until its deportation in March 1942. Father Julius Stern, Mother Hedwig and the siblings Werner and Eleonore were murdered.”

  Guy stayed lifelong friends with Fred Howard, with whom he acted in concert as “Commissar Krukov” to obtain valuable intelligence from German prisoners. Always a fount of new ideas, Fred became a pioneer of modern in-store merchandising, founding the largest point-of-purchase display company in the United States and becoming a multimillionaire. He died in 2008.

  In 2017, Guy was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor for his role in the liberation of France during World War II. As for his years as a Ritchie Boy, Guy said, “Eisenhower called it a crusade in Europe. It was that. But for us, the German-Jewish refugee soldiers, it was a private crusade. We had to defeat the Nazis.”

  Murray Zappler and Kurt Jacobs

  Gravesite of murdered Ritchie Boy Kurt Jacobs at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, located on a hill overlooking a bucolic valley in Belgium. (Carl Wouters)

  Gravesite of murdered Ritchie Boy Murray Zappler at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery. (Carl Wouters)

  The two murdered Ritchie Boys were initially buried at a temporary U.S. military cemetery in Foy, Belgium. They were interred there on February 15, 1945, two days after their bodies were recovered in the field near the customs house just across the German border.

  In the late 1940s, the army repatriated many of the Americans buried at Foy to the United States in accordance with their families’ wishes. When the Foy cemetery closed, Jacobs and Zappler were brought for permanent burial, on January 9, 1949, to Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, east of Liège, Belgium, where they remain at rest with nearly eight thousand other members of the U.S. military who died in World War II.

  Acknowledgments

  Narrat
ive nonfiction starts and ends with rigorous research, which allows an author to be meticulously selective in using only the material that adds to the impact of the story. My two lead researchers, Steve Goodell and Dan Gross, both of the Washington, D.C., area, were extraordinarily helpful during the course of this two-year project. Steve is a superb archival and online researcher in all facets of World War II, and Dan has amassed a Ritchie Boys database with information from some twenty thousand personnel records. I was also assisted by Nadine Kaufmann in Berlin; Jamie Woodring in Michigan; Lori Miller of Redbird Research in St. Louis; Ruth Quinn and Lori Tagg at U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca; Carl Wouters in Belgium; Karl Laun in Austria; Lea Bauer and Christiane Oechsner-Bauer in Germany; and Sabine Anton in New York.

  Special thanks to the dedicated staff and volunteers at the Holocaust Memorial Center (HMC) in Farmington Hills, Michigan, especially Guy Stern, director of the HMC’s Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous, who, in 2011, curated an exhibit, The Secret Heroes, the first in-depth exploration into the lives and achievements of the Ritchie Boys, as well as his assistant, Shirlee Wyman Harris, and former HMC director Steve Goldman. I am also grateful to the late German filmmaker Christian Bauer for his moving 2004 documentary, The Ritchie Boys.

  Closer to home, thanks to my William Morrow editor, Henry Ferris, and his assistant, Nick Amphlett, for their enthusiasm and support; to my literary agent, Dan Conaway, for his sage advice; and to his Writers House colleague, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, for her keen eye.

  This book would not have been possible without the limitless patience and tireless contributions of Victor Brombert, Stephan Lewy, Manny Steinfeld, and Guy Stern, all of whom spent many hours, days, months—okay, years—answering my unending questions in person, on the phone, and via e-mail. To this list I also add Percy and Dan Angress, sons of the late Werner Angress, and Tom Selling, son of the late Martin Selling.