Standard-issue WWII documentary about the anything but standard-issue Ritchie Boys. Self-exiled Europeans, mostly German Jews, who got out just before hostilities started, and were either drafted or volunteered for war service only to quickly find themselves transferred to the idyllic countryside of Camp Ritchie, MD where they were assigned to the elite unit of Military Intelligence Training Center. All multilingual (idiomatic, if not accent-free) in three or four languages*, they were uniquely qualified for enemy interrogation and in getting information on troop & equipment movements from suspicious locals. Many of them sent in with the Normandy invasion (some introduction to war!) before continuing East where they eventually would be caught up in The Battle of the Bulge; something they had tried to warn their superiors about. These are the guys who put the great into the Greatest Generation; a phrase tossed around far too easily. Interviewed in their eighties, you can get a real feel for them (and for this film) in the two obits linked below on the last two surviving members. Brilliant men who all seemed to have gone on to remarkable post-war careers, all of them holding back their stories for decades. Great stuff here, the memories precious, the sentiments wise.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Attention by whomever did post-production for writer/director Christian Bauer as newsreel and archival actualities used between the 2004 interviews are all mastered to fit the wider modern frame ratio not by enlarging the old square picture, but with anamorphic distortion to stretch the image.
READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK: *Two surprise take-aways from the stories. Best way to scare a Nazi into talking? Tell them they’ll be sent over to the Russian authorities for questioning. Scariest threat for the Ritchie Boys at the front? Having the same accent as the Nazi infiltrators dressed in US uniforms. Especially if you weren’t a baseball fan and didn’t know who won the World Series. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/europe/guy-stern-dead.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/us/victor-brombert-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1
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