Ritchie Boys of WWII

11/03/2026

Adolf “Al” Steiner was born on August 16, 1915, as Adolf Wiesengrund in Nördlingen, Bavaria, where his father operated a w**e and coal business. Around 1934, as N**i persecution intensified, Al fled Germany with his mother and sister and emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in New York.

His father, Siegfried Wiesengrund, remained in Germany. In 1938, Siegfried was arrested and imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1942, he was deported to the Lublin region of occupied Poland, where he was murdered during the Holocaust. A Stolperstein memorial in Hochheim am Main, Germany, commemorates his life.

During World War II, Al Steiner joined the U.S. Army and trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. On December 15, 1943, Steiner was among the original members of Interrogation of Prisoners of War (IPW) Team 46. On January 27, 1944, Team 46 sailed from New York aboard the Rangitata, bound for Great Britain. The team subsequently joined the U.S. Army's 30th Infantry Division and landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy six days after D-Day.

For the next eleven months, Team 46 operated across France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The team served during major campaigns, including the fighting around Mortain in August 1944, operations along the German frontier, and the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. On January 22, 1945, Steiner received his commission as a lieutenant after serving as a master sergeant. His fellow soldiers recorded the occasion in their team history, describing the ceremony and celebration.

In March 1945, Steiner accompanied an advance party during the Allied crossing of the Rhine River. The team continued its intelligence operations as American forces advanced deeper into Germany. By May 1, IPW Team 46 reported a cumulative total of 11,111 prisoners processed during its wartime service. A detailed history compiled by members of Team 46 in August 1945 documents Steiner's participation in prisoner interrogations, the organization and processing of German prisoners, and intelligence operations close to the front lines.

Following the war, Steiner settled in New Jersey, where he married Lucille Globus. Together, they raised two children, Susan and Michael, and made their home in Teaneck. Steiner also established a successful career in manufacturing. By approximately 1975, he was president of Kinzee Industries, a Saddle Brook-based manufacturer of kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and related products.

Al Steiner died on December 15, 1995, at the age of 80.

10/18/2026

Ritchie Boy Kurt Klein was born in Walldorf, Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in 1937. Following graduation from the fifth Ritchie training class in 1943, he served in Patton’s Third Army, primarily as a POW interrogator. He later received a field commission as a 2nd Lieutenant.
As a POW interrogator, he crossed paths with author Ernest Hemingway who, while serving as a war correspondent in France, would occasionally join members of the French Resistance and others on raids to capture German soldiers. After one such unauthorized “mission,” Hemingway brought prisoners to Kurt to be interrogated.
Shortly after the war, Kurt participated in the interrogation of Hi**er’s personal chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who described in detail how he had followed Hi**er’s instructions to burn the Furher’s and Eva Braun’s bodies in the courtyard of the Berlin bunker where they committed su***de.
Days after the war ended, Kurt arranged safe passage into the American Zone of Occupation for a small group of former slave labor factory workers. Forty-two years later Kurt was tracked down by one of those workers who informed him that included in that group were Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie, who the workers were trying to protect from falling into the hands of the Soviet army. Kurt later met with Emilie in Los Angeles at a special screening of “Schindler’s List”.
Kurt’s most significant war experience occurred on May 7, 1945, when he was part of an army unit that liberated 120 survivors of a death march (of more than 1,000 who started the trek) in Volary, Czechoslovakia. He was struck by his encounter with one of the women, Gerda Weissmann, and visited her as she recovered in the following weeks. They fell in love and were married in 1946 and settled in Buffalo, N.Y.
In addition to Kurt’s post-war career as owner of a printing company, he and Gerda devoted their energies to initiatives promoting tolerance and combatting hunger. Gerda’s Holocaust experiences are recounted in her autobiography, All But My Life, and the HBO documentary “One Survivor Remembers.” They co-authored The Hours After, which recounts the story of their meeting and months-long correspondence before they were married.
The 1994 PBS documentary “America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference” extensively profiles Kurt’s years-long struggle to persuade the U.S. State Department to grant emigration visas to his parents who, ultimately, were killed in Auschwitz. Kurt passed away in 2002 while he and Gerda were on a lecture tour in Central America.

10/05/2026

🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨

The Ritchie Boys Wiki is now live!
👉 https://www.ritchieboys.wiki (you can also use www.ritchieboys.org)

This new open wiki is built so families, researchers, and anyone interested can explore and contribute to the history of those who trained at Camp Ritchie.

What’s on the site:

🔍 Searchable roster (by name or Army serial number)

🧭 Soldier profiles with bios, timelines, awards, photos, and sources

📚 Class pages, Camp Ritchie history, books, interviews, related stories

🏛️ Connected programs like Fort Hunt / P.O. Box 1142

Important:
All content from theritchieboys.com has been fully migrated into the new site, so everything you’re familiar with is already there, now in a more flexible, expandable format.

About the launch:
The Wiki is still growing. Some profiles are detailed; others are just starting out. Research notes are leads, and sources are where to verify facts. If you spot an issue or have something to add, the site makes it easy to reach out.

How you can help:
If you have photos, obituaries, letters, corrections, or you’re searching for a relative, visit the site, look up a name, and use the contribute/contact options.

Reminder:
It’s a wiki, anyone can edit, so always check sources when verifying information.

Note:
This is an independent project and not affiliated with the Ritchie History Museum, though we hope to collaborate in the future.

Open roster and memorial for Camp Ritchie soldiers - search by name or ASN, read biographies, and help add photos and corrections. A work in progress: profiles vary in length.

09/24/2026

Mountain Spies Tearline | September 25th, 2026

Camp Ritchie: Where America Learned to Understand the Enemy

When most people encounter the story of Camp Ritchie, they first encounter the Ritchie Boys. That is understandable. Many were German-speaking refugees who returned to Europe in American uniforms and used language, cultural knowledge, and firsthand understanding of Germany to interrogate prisoners, translate documents, and support combat units in the field. Their story is compelling, but it can also obscure the larger institutional importance of the place where they trained.

The United States did not enter World War II without military intelligence. The Army already had the Military Intelligence Division, military attachés, cryptanalytic organizations, intelligence officers, and specialists studying foreign armies, terrain, communications, and order of battle. The problem was not the absence of intelligence activity. The problem was that the prewar system had not been built to support an Army expanding rapidly into a global war.

A global war required intelligence capacity on a different scale.

Modern war produced enormous quantities of information. Prisoners could identify units and commanders. Captured documents could reveal organization, plans, and logistics. Aerial photography could show defensive positions, transportation networks, and concentrations of forces. Maps and terrain studies could identify routes, obstacles, and avenues of approach. Reports from the battlefield, from resistance organizations, and from other intelligence channels added still more pieces.

The difficulty was not simply collecting information. It was determining what was reliable, placing each piece in context, comparing it with other reporting, identifying patterns, and turning the result into something a commander could use.

That was one of the problems the Army sought to address when the Military Intelligence Training Center opened at Camp Ritchie on June 19, 1942.

Ritchie offered an immediate practical advantage. It was already a functioning Maryland National Guard installation with barracks, roads, utilities, ranges, and access to the national transportation network. Its location in the South Mountain landscape provided relative isolation while keeping the school within reach of Washington. The Army could expand an existing post much faster than it could build a new intelligence center from raw land.

The school also emerged during a broader period of American institutional learning. Before the United States entered the war, American officers had traveled to Britain to study how the British Army organized and trained intelligence personnel under wartime conditions. Several returned recommending greater centralization of intelligence training. British specialists later participated in the formative period at Ritchie. The significance of that relationship was not that the United States copied the British system. It was that American officers were able to observe a military already at war, identify useful methods, and adapt those methods to American requirements.

The curriculum at Camp Ritchie reflected the breadth of those requirements. Students trained in prisoner interrogation, interpretation and translation, aerial photographic interpretation, terrain intelligence, order of battle, captured-document exploitation, counterintelligence, enemy weapons, and other specialties. More than 19,000 officers and enlisted personnel trained there during the war.

The men later known collectively as the Ritchie Boys were part of that larger system. Their language skills and cultural knowledge made many of them unusually effective, particularly in interrogation and translation, but the importance of Camp Ritchie extended beyond any single specialty. The school brought different intelligence disciplines together in one place and trained people to understand how to combine information from separate sources.

A prisoner might identify an enemy unit. A captured document could reveal how that unit was organized. Aerial photography might show where it was positioned. Terrain analysis could help determine how it might move. Order-of-battle specialists could compare those findings with earlier reporting and place the unit within a larger formation. No single source necessarily provided the answer. The value came from the relationship among them.

The Army was building more than a school. It was developing the people, specialties, methods, and institutional capacity required to transform battlefield information into military intelligence on a scale the prewar Army had never needed. The process had existed before Ritchie, and Camp Ritchie did not create American military intelligence. What it did was concentrate, standardize, test, and expand capabilities that a global war suddenly made essential.

The relationship between training and operations also moved in both directions. Ritchie-trained personnel went overseas, applied what they had learned, and generated new reporting from combat. Experience from the field, in turn, influenced what the Army taught and how intelligence was produced. The school was therefore not isolated from the war. It was part of a larger system in which training, collection, analysis, and operational experience continually informed one another.

The Ritchie Boys remain central to the story, but they were part of something more consequential than a collection of remarkable individual biographies. Camp Ritchie helped turn wartime intelligence from a collection of specialized activities into a scalable Army capability. This is the part of the story that I want to make sure is shared.

09/20/2026

An incredible story that begins with the 99th in Belgium. For me it is joined by the man who would become my friend that I would have soup with at the National Archives every time I could. He was Dan Gross, a resercher of the Ritchie Boys. Guy Stern was a common topic of conversation.

Both of the stories, the 99th and Camp Ritchie were shaped by General Raymond Lee. The man who asked General Marshall if he could create units of aliens in America. Marshall said yes and laws were changed and our fathers, uncles and many more took up arms for the US. My dad got his citizenship in Leadville, Colorado, riding a GI 2 1/2 ton truck both ways.

09/15/2026

The Ritchie Boy community thanks Katy and the museum for the kind words regarding the passing of Bernie.

With the families permission, we are saddened to announce the passing of Bernie Lubran, the proud son of Ritchie Boy Walter Lubran. Bernie was not only a supporter of the Ritchie History Museum but also a true friend. He was president of the educational non-profit "Friends of Camp Ritchie," a program dedicated to preserving the history of Camp Ritchie and the stories of the soldiers who trained here during WWII. He also oversaw the Ritchie Boys of WWII for many years and was a driving force behind the push for the Congressional Gold Medal for the Ritchie Boys. He served as a point of contact for other Ritchie Boy families and took every opportunity to meet them. He was always willing to help whenever he could, and our Ritchie Boy community deeply feels his absence.

From our Director, Katy Self: "Bernie was the first member of a Ritchie Boy family that I met. He drove to the museum within my first two weeks on the job. He was eager to share his knowledge of the Ritchie Boys and to learn about our plans and how he could get involved. Over the past three years, he has become a good friend and someone I could turn to for help or advice. He always had a smile and a pleasant attitude, no matter what. He will be missed. Our hearts go out to his wife Fran and his daughters during this difficult time".

08/28/2026

Lieutenant Bill Galen was trained in the third Camp Ritchie class of World War II, from which he graduated two days before Christmas 1942. He went on to serve 31 months overseas during the war, mostly in Italy, often where he had frequent contact with enemy combatants, both in battle and during interrogations.

Galen was a native of Cleveland and grew up speaking some German because of his family heritage. He attended Valparaiso College during the Great Depression and was a schoolteacher in Ohio prior to being drafted in 1941. When the Army learned of his fluency in German, he was sent in 1942 to Officers Candidate School and then the G-2 training program at Camp Ritchie.

Galen was shipped to North Africa in April 1943, then was among the first wave of Allied troops to invade Sicily in July. He subsequently joined two other amphibious landings in Italy, at Salerno and Anzio, was promoted to captain, and liberated Rome in June 1944.

Expecting to be sent to France after the Normandy invasion, he instead was promoted to be the executive officer in charge of POW interrogations for the Fifth Army headquartered in Florence, where he spent the last eight months of the war. In northern Italy, he commanded HQ Detachment 2680, consisting of G2 teams staffed by noncoms and junior intelligence officers. In all, Galen served with the 3rd, 36th and 85th divisions, along with II Corps and the 5th Army HQ, and earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in the process.

After the victory in Europe, Galen was assigned to the U.S. occupation force in Austria that summer, finally coming back to the states in November 1945. He returned briefly to the Midwest after leaving the Army, but moved to Los Angeles in 1946 to pursue a career as a professional singer (after having taken singing lessons in Italy, which spurred his dreams).

He never got his lucky break in show business, but thanks to the GI Bill, obtaining a graduate degree at the University of Southern California eventually led to a career as a music professor. Galen married in 1961 and settled in Nebraska, where he and his wife Betty raised two sons while he taught voice, piano and even some German at a small private college. He died in 1994 at age 80. For more on his role as a Ritchie Boy, the website www.G2warletters.com features hundreds of letters and photos Galen shared with family during the war.

08/14/2026

Ritchie Boy Herbert Kraus was born in Demmelsdorf, Germany, in 1917, during the first World War. Demmelsdorf was a tiny hamlet with more cows than people, and fittingly, Kraus’s family was in the cattle business.

As life became increasingly difficult for Jews under Hi**er, Kraus escaped N**i Germany and found refuge in the U.S. in 1938. His brothers and mother also made it to America, but his father died shortly after Kristallnacht, the November 1938 N**i pogrom against Germany’s Jews. Kraus volunteered for the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor, but was rejected because he was considered an “enemy alien.”

Herbert was eventually drafted and entered the Army in April 1943. Kraus was transferred to Camp Ritchie that summer, graduating from the 10th training class in September. Kraus then served in the 36th Infantry (or T-Patch, with the “T” indicating Texas) Division during the remainder of the war. He was part of the Division HQ interrogation team until the end of WWII, serving in North Africa, Italy, France, Austria, and Germany. Kraus entered the Army as a Private and left as a Second Lieutenant, having received a field commission for his service.

At the end of the war, Kraus uncovered the true identity of Josef "Sepp" Dietrich, a notorious Waffen SS General who was masquerading as a civilian in a POW cage. Dietrich – the third-highest ranking SS officer – was tried and imprisoned for life by the U.S. for his prominent role in the murder of 84 U.S. POWs during the Battle of the Bulge, in what became known as the Malmedy Massacre. Kraus also briefly interrogated Herman Goering after he was captured by the T-Patch Division in May 1945, and he likely interrogated Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who held the highest field command in the German Army.

Kraus remained in Germany after VE day, helping the Allies de-N**ify southwestern Germany. During this time, he went back to Demmelsdorf to visit his father’s grave for the first time, only to see that the Jewish Cemetery had been ransacked and his father’s gravestone was missing. He found the culprit and demanded the immediate restoration of both the cemetery and the gravestone. His demand was honored with alacrity, and both remain in good repair to this day.

After the war, Kraus returned to his adopted hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where he married, raised a family, and was involved in community and synagogue life. He died in 1986, and like so many returning soldiers, Kraus didn’t talk about his war experiences. The preceding account is based on his records uncovered and researched by his son Jeff Kraus.

07/31/2026

Born in Manhattan in 1913, the son of Sicilian immigrants, Ritchie Boy Sgt. Salvatore J. Salemi followed his father into the fruit and produce business in Queens while still a teenager.

By the mid-1930s, Salemi had begun operating his own produce stores (and competing as a bantamweight amateur boxer) until his induction into the Army in Nov. 1942. He was trained at Camp Ritchie in the winter of ‘42-‘43, leading to an assignment as an Italian language interpreter/interrogator of POWs with the 5th Army’s 2680th HQ Company, which he joined in North Africa early in 1943.

Salemi was attached to the 3rd Infantry Division from N. Africa to Sicily, Naples and Anzio, the breakout into Rome, and later into Southern France in the summer of 1944. He returned to the Italian theater in Tuscany in the fall of '44 before coming home to the U.S. on a well-earned December 1944 furlough.

However, Salemi was sent back to Italy in January 1945 for an assignment with the 10th Mtn. Division in the Apennine mountains. His new duties included reconnaissance/observation of enemy positions, followed by written reports and interrogations of thousands of refugees and prisoners in the Cutigliano and Rocca Pitigliano areas in northern Italy that served as hideouts for Axis troops.

During the Po Valley campaign (Feb.–May '45), he earned both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. In June, he left the 10th Division to serve with the U.S. Army of Occupation, primarily in Austria, until his discharge in Nov. '45. He was a contemporary of fellow Ritchie Boys who served with the G-2 operation in Italy, including Alex Sabbadini, Fritz Goldarbeiter and Bill Galen.

After his WWII service, Salemi led a quiet life in the New York area, returning to the fruit and produce business as a self-employed owner/operator and retail vendor. Sal married his wife Liberty (Libby) in 1947, with whom he enjoyed a long life in Woodside, Queens, living until ages 95 and 102, respectively. Their family included sons Dr. Joseph S. Salemi and Rosario O. Salemi, both of whom have detailed knowledge of U.S. Army actions in Sicily and Italy during the war.

07/19/2026

Henry Wald, born as Heinz Werner Schőnwald in 1912, is among the thousands of Ritchie Boys who started life in Germany – and whose Army service, including time at Camp Ritchie, is still somewhat undefined.

Wald grew up in the small town of Großröhrsdorf. After high school, he pursued several advanced programs in business and served as the junior manager of the department store owned by his parents. After the N**is came to power in 1933, he was arrested by the local police for a “race crime.” He fled his hometown, lived briefly in Berlin until 1938, and then left Germany for New York in March 1939.

Though technically an enemy alien, Henry volunteered for the Army two years after arriving in the U.S. and was inducted at Fort Francis E. Warren in Wyoming in November 1942. He was transferred to Camp Sill in Oklahoma and was granted American citizenship after completing Basic Training there. Henry was then transferred to the Army Specialized Training Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he joined a cohort of 25-30 fellow German Jewish refugees. In addition to courses on world history and advanced German, his curriculum included a course on interrogating people accused of crimes.

Before he completed his coursework, he and his Stanford colleagues were transferred to Camp Ritchie in October 1943. Due to various medical issues and, likely, to his age, he was granted an honorable discharge and returned to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he had lived for some years. But that’s not his full war story.

Henry’s military assignments and service are still not fully defined. He spent just a year in the Army before his release, at Fort Sill, Stanford, and a very brief time at Camp Ritchie. Subsequent paperwork shows, however, that he performed the duties of a Ritchie Boy trainee while overseas. In the 21st century, a resident of Großröhrsdorf located two veterans of the German army, both of whom affirmed that they were interrogated by Henry Wald while Prisoners of War, one in Paris, the other in a small town near Großröhrsdorf. Despite considerable effort, Wald’s wartime activities have not been fully clarified, leaving it unclear how he was engaged in those interrogations.

After the war, Henry returned to Nebraska, where he had been studying accounting at the university prior to his induction. He resumed his studies and continued to work for the Northwestern Metal Company, his first permanent employer in the U.S. Together with two other students, he formed an accounting practice. Henry’s clientele comprised mostly Jewish-owned firms in Lincoln and small agricultural operations in eastern Nebraska. He was active in the local Jewish community, serving for nearly 40 years as treasurer of the Lincoln Jewish Welfare Federation and president of the local Little League baseball organization.

Wald's life and that of his family are chronicled in the book www.ghostsonthewallbook.com.