Sanctuary and disappointment: Jewish German refugees in the United States Army in World War II

Authors

• Zachary P. Watts, James Madison UniversityFollow

Preferred Name

Zachary Watts

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Date of Graduation

5-14-2026

Semester of Graduation

Spring

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Department of History

First Advisor

Philip D. Dillard

Second Advisor

Andrew Witmer

Third Advisor

Jonathan S. Jones

Abstract

This paper examines the experiences of German-Jewish refugees who became intelligence soldiers in the United States Army. They are frequently called the Ritchie Boys, for their training in Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The paper focuses mostly on a single Ritchie Boy named Frank Adler, who came to the United States as a teenager from Austria in 1938 and ended up returning to his hometown as a soldier. The Ritchie History museum holds a large collection of Adler’s letters which form the most important source for this project. I have found a duality of experience from German and Austrian Jews in the United States Military. The United States was a place of sanctuary or refuge for these people and celebrated their diversity as Jews, but mismanagement also led to their discrimination, both because they were Jewish and because they were German. As a smaller, secondary objective, this paper points out the nuanced and mostly peaceful intelligence tactics of the Ritchie Boys in their interrogations with Nazi POWs.