60 Minutes - 5/9/2021: Ingenuity and Perseverance, The Ritchie Boys

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

On this week's "60 Minutes," Anderson Cooper goes inside the dramatic missions to Mars by the tiny helicopter Ingenuity and the rover Perseverance. He reports that NASA's dramatic landing on the Red Planet in February wasn't as smooth as it may have seemed to people watching at home. In a two-part report, Jon Wertheim story of the "Ritchie Boys," a group who used their knowledge of German language and culture to gather more than half the combat intelligence on the Western Front. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. Getting your kids to school safely is important to you. It's important to us, too. Toyota, for what matters most. Nine years of work, seven minutes of terror. He's talking about the recent descent and landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. Execute entry, descent, and landing on her own. And there goes the descent stage.

Big sigh of relief. I almost collapsed over this console. Part of its mission, and landing on her own. And there goes the descent stage. Big sigh of relief. I almost collapsed over this console. Part of its mission, to drop off Ingenuity, a mini helicopter that would take off and navigate in the Martian atmosphere, much to NASA's delight. Think you know all about World War II's greatest heroes? Think again. Tonight, you'll meet three surviving members of a secret group called the Richie Boys.

11,000 American soldiers, many of them Jews who had fled Nazi Germany, and were trained in espionage and psychological warfare. How effective were they at gathering intelligence? They were incredibly effective. Sixty-plus percent of the actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield was gathered by Ritchie boys. They made a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought, the entire sets of battles on the Western Front. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions.

Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. We first told you about the tiny helicopter Ingenuity and the one-ton rover Perseverance nearly a year ago, before they left Earth. But they've come a very long way since then. In February, they landed in a hazardous and previously unexplored part of Mars called

the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance will be looking for signs of ancient life. Last month, Ingenuity disconnected from Perseverance's belly and made history, performing the first flights ever in the atmosphere of another planet. It's hard to imagine, but worth remembering as you watch what we're about to show you that this all happened millions of miles away in outer space. Last month, in this desolate Martian crater, 170 million miles from Earth, Perseverance posed for a selfie with Ingenuity, the little helicopter it had just dropped off. Two weeks later, the rover's cameras recorded Ingenuity's historic first flight, hovering 10 feet off the ground for 30 seconds. It may not look like much, but for those who'd

worked so long to make it happen, it was a reason to rejoice. Project manager Mimi Ong led the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California that's been working on Ingenuity for six years. How hard is it to fly a helicopter on Mars? Very, very, very hard. We really truly started with the question of, is it possible? A lot of people thought it could not be done. Because it's really counterintuitive. I mean, you need atmosphere for the place to push atmosphere to get lived.

The atmosphere on Mars is completely different than the world. The atmosphere on Mars is so thin. I mean, the room we're in, right, it's compared to that, it was one percent of the atmospheric density over there. So the question of really, can you generate enough lift, you know, to really build, to lift up anything, that was the fundamental question. In subsequent flights, ingenuity has gone longer and farther, traveling for about two minutes and nearly the length of three football fields. It is a triumph not only for NASA, but for its partners in the private sector who help make various parts of the helicopter. Don't let it go. Don't freak out.

Matt Keenan has a history of making unusual things that can fly. He's an engineer at a company called AeroVironment, which produces drones for military and civilian use. I mean, that's incredible. Ten years ago, for a military research project, Keenan and his team created this robotic hummingbird, which has a tiny camera on board. Whoa!

There it is. Oh, my God, that's amazing. Keenan and engineer Ben Peipenberg led the AeroVironment team that created Ingenuity's rotors, motors, and landing gear. Why was this so challenging? Because it has to be a spacecraft as well as an aircraft. And flying it as an aircraft on Mars is pretty challenging because of the density of the air

that's similar to about Earth at 100,000 feet. How do you go about it? Well, so building everything extremely lightweight is really, really critical. The helicopter's blades, for example, are made of a styrofoam-like material coated with carbon fiber. Yeah, yeah.

They're stiff and strong. Get a sense of how lightweight and stiff that is. I mean, it's nothing. Yeah, it weighs nothing. But incredibly light. Here we go, taking off. This is the first time they've shown an outsider this version of ingenuity, which they plan to use for education and research.

They call it Terry. A liftoff. Here on Earth, Terry's blades are spinning at about 400 revolutions per minute. On Mars, in the thin atmosphere, they'd have to spin six times faster to generate the same lift. And then land. Ingenuity costs $85 million to build and operate.

Terry, a lot less. But it's still nerve-wracking to be handed its controls. All right, go ahead, you've got it, slide it right. You can push it all the way to the right if you want. Slide left. I'll bring it up a little bit, now stop. The joysticks we use to fly Terry are of no use on Mars. Radio signals take too long to get there. All right, let me take over now. I've switched you out and we'll go back to the... Even someone as good at flying drones and hummingbirds as Matt Keenan couldn't fly a helicopter on Mars. Here's what happened in 2014 in a test chamber that replicated the atmosphere on Mars when Keenan tried to use a joystick to fly an early version of Ingenuity.

Surprise! Wow. All right. So much for that vehicle. So this very quick demonstration is it should you, a human being can't respond quickly enough to control it. Exactly. So engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory equipped Ingenuity with a computerized system that allows it to stabilize itself and navigate on its own. In 2016, the new system aced the chamber test. The blades are being commanded, you know, four or five hundred times per second. They proved it could fly, but Ingenuity still had to weigh under four pounds and fit in the belly of Perseverance. Five, four, engine ignition, two, one. And it had to be tough enough to survive the journey to Mars. And liftoff. On July 30, 2020, Perseverance and Ingenuity

took off from Cape Canaveral. Nearly seven months later, as this simulation shows, the spacecraft's heat shield hit the Martian atmosphere, going 12,000 miles per hour. Perseverance ready to execute entry, descent and landing on her own. As he sat in the control room, Al Chen, the leader of the landing team, had absolutely no control. Radio signals would take about 11 minutes to travel from Earth to Mars. The spacecraft was pre-programmed to descend, maneuver, and pick a landing site on its own. All the work his colleagues hoped to do on Mars would be impossible if his part of the mission failed. How long have you been working on this mission? Coming up on nine years

or so. Really? That's a lot of work for seven minutes of terror. Nine years of work, seven minutes of terror. It's done if the parachute doesn't work. That's right. No one wants to be the guy that drops the baton. No landing by a spacecraft has ever been recorded as well as this one. There were six cameras capturing it all from different angles. The parachute deployed, then the heat shield fell away like a lens cap, and Perseverance got its first look at the ground. This is not a simulation. This is what it looks like to parachute onto Mars.

How fast is it moving at this point? Yeah, we're still going about 350 miles an hour and still slowing down. So it looks gentle here, but in fact, it's falling at more than 300 miles an hour. That's right. We're heading straight down at near race card speeds. Below lay a series of safe landing spots, but the wind was blowing the spacecraft towards more treacherous territory to the east, and Perseverance sent a message to Earth saying the thrusters it needed to slow down might not be working properly. So you get a reading saying the jets that are going to help it slow down

and control the landing, that they're not working. So what do you do? Nothing you can do, right? Everything's already happened. That's the mind-bending part of this, right? You are sweating now. Yeah, exactly. I'm right back there again. So, yeah. Altitude about 300 meters.

To Alchen's relief, Perseverance's computerized landing system did what it was designed to do. It found a suitable landing spot even in rocky terrain. And despite the warning, the thrusters worked. You can see them kicking up dust as they fire to slow the spacecraft down. Sky crane maneuver has started. The descent stage, known as the sky crane, lowered Perseverance to the ground. It hovered for a moment, then flew off to crash a safe distance away. And there goes the descent stage. Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance to the ground. It hovered for a moment, then flew off to crash a safe distance away. And there goes the descent stage. Wow. Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance,

take place on the surface of Mars. So at that point, big sigh of relief. You know, I almost collapsed over this console. Ever since Perseverance landed on the Red Planet, a team of engineers, programmers, and scientists here on Earth have been living on Mars time. It's their job to monitor the rover's health and tell it where to go and how to search for signs of life. While Perseverance sleeps to conserve energy during the freezing Martian nights, the team on Earth analyzes the photographs and instrument readings it's sent back. They then prepare a list of things for it to do the following morning when it wakes

up. And so it's just after midnight on Mars. The vehicle's asleep. Project manager Matt Wallace explained that a day on Mars is 40 minutes longer than on Earth. The team's schedule is constantly changing. So all the people here are Mars night shift workers. Yeah, that's a good way to think of it. Yeah. But I mean, working night shift is tough enough, but this is a night shift that's constantly shifting. Constantly moving, that's right, yeah. On Perseverance's fourth day on Mars, it swiveled the powerful camera on its mast and took a look around.

A space enthusiast named Sean Doran put the images together, set them to music, and posted the movie on YouTube. Even one of the top scientists on the project was moved when he saw it. I went and got a beer and watched this thing scroll by. And that was the moment when I felt like I was there. Ken Farley leads the science team that will direct Perseverance through the Jezero crater. It's an area that scientists have long wanted to search for signs of ancient life that may be hidden in the rocks. The oldest evidence of life on Earth is about three and a half billion years old.

Those rocks were deposited in a shallow sea. This crater that you see here was a lake three and a half billion years ago. So we are looking at the same environment and the same time period on two different planets. And if it's determined however long in the future that no, there was not ever life, what does that mean? The place where Perseverance landed here in Jezero Crater is the most habitable time period on Mars and the most habitable environment that we know about. This is as good as it gets, at least with our current understanding of what Mars has to offer. And if we don't find life here, it does make us worry that perhaps it doesn't exist anywhere. Perseverance hasn't strayed far from its landing site yet,

but its telescopic camera has already spotted a large number of boulders that Ken Farley says he didn't expect to see in the middle of an ancient lake. So this has surprised you? Absolutely, yeah. So what did those boulders tell you? The most reasonable interpretation is a flood. You don't have fast-flowing water out in the middle of the lake. You get fast-flowing water in a river. And so what that's telling us is there was a river that was capable of transporting boulders that were this big. So what, the lake would have gone down, perhaps, and then later on there was a flood?

Yeah, exactly. Perseverance was supposed to leave Ingenuity behind after a 30-day demonstration of its flying ability. But NASA officials recently said they'll keep the duo together for another month to explore how rovers and helicopters might work together in the future. The fastest that Perseverance was designed to travel is a tenth of a mile per hour. Ingenuity has already gone 80 times faster, according to project manager Mimi Ong. Adding an aerial vehicle, a flying vehicle for space exploration will be game-changing. It frees you in a way.

Absolutely, yes. So a flying vehicle, a rotorcraft would allow us to get to places we simply can't access today, like sites of steep cliffs, you know, inside deep crevices. After Perseverance explores the floor of Jezero Crater, it'll head towards what's believed to be the remnant of an ancient river delta, where billions of years ago conditions should have been right for microorganisms to exist. As this simulation shows, the rover's robotic arm can collect about 40 core samples of rock that'll be sealed in special tubes and left on the planet's surface. NASA plans to send another mission to Mars

to retrieve the tubes and bring them back to Earth. In about 10 years, Ken Farley says, scientists examining those samples may be confronted with a new and perplexing question. How do you look for life that may not be life as you know it? We've never had to do that before. We've never had to actually ask the question.

Is there a form of life that we can't even conceive of? Yeah, we're going to have to conceive of it. I think that's the whole point of this. We're going to have to start conceiving of life as we don't know it. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will be making tracks on Mars for years to come. Since it's carrying the first working audio microphones on the red planet, we'll leave you with what it sounds like as the one-ton rover slowly moves across the vast,

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Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. For as casually as we often toss around the word hero, sometimes no lesser term applies. Tonight, we'll introduce you to members of a secret American intelligence unit who fought in World War II. What's most extraordinary about this group? Many of them were German-born Jews who fled their homeland, came to America, and then joined the U.S. Army. Their mission? To use their knowledge of the German language and culture to return to Europe

and fight Nazism. The Ritchie Boys, as they were known, trained in espionage and frontline interrogation, and incredibly, they were responsible for most of the combat intelligence gathered on the Western Front. For decades, they didn't discuss their work. Fortunately, some of the Ritchie boys are still around to tell their tales. And that includes the life force that is Guy Stern, age 99. You work six days a week, you swim every morning, you lecture. Any signs of slowing down? Well, I think not. But I don't run as fast, I don't swim as fast, but I feel happy with my tasks.

A few months shy of turning 100, Guy Stern drips with vitality. He still works six days a week, and if you get up early enough, you might catch him working out at his local park in the Detroit suburbs. But ask him about his most formative experience, and he doesn't hesitate. It was his service in the military during World War II. What was it like for you leaving Nazi Germany, escaping as a Jew, and the next time you go back to Europe, it's to fight those guys? What was that like? I was a soldier doing my job, and that precluded any concern that I was going back to a country I once was very attached to. I had a war to fight and I did it.

This is Guy Stern 80 years ago. He is among the last surviving Ritchie Boys, a group of young men, many of them German Jews, who played an outsized role in helping the Allies win World War II. They took their name from the place they trained, Camp Ritchie, Maryland, a secret American military intelligence center during the war. Starting in 1942, more than 11,000 soldiers went through the rigorous training at what was the Army's first centralized school for intelligence and psychological warfare. The purpose of the facility was to train interrogators. That was the biggest weakness that the Army recognized it had, which was battlefield intelligence and the interrogation needed to

talk to sometimes civilians, most of the time prisoners of war, in order to glean information from them. David Fry is a professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. How effective were they at gathering intelligence? They were incredibly effective. Sixty-plus percent of the actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield was gathered by Ritchie boys. 60% of the actionable intelligence. Yes. They made a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought, the entire sets of battles on the Western Front. Recruits were chosen based on their knowledge of European language and culture,

as well as their high IQs. Essentially, they were intellectuals. The largest set of graduates were 2,000 German-born Jews. If we take Camp Ritchie in microcosm, it was almost the ideal of an American melting pot. You had people coming from all over, uniting for a particular cause. All in service of winning the war. All in service of winning the war, and there's nothing that forges unity better than having a common enemy. You had a whole load of immigrants who really wanted to get back into the fight. Immigrants like Guy Stern. He grew up in a close-knit family in the town of Hildesheim, Germany.

When Hitler took power in 1933, Stern says the climate grew increasingly hostile. My fellow students, it was an all-male school, withdrew from you. Because you were Jewish, you were ostracized. That is correct. I went to my father one day and I said, classes are becoming a torture chamber. By 1937, violence against Jews was escalating. Sensing danger, Stern's father tried to get the family out. But the Sterns could only send one of their own to the U.S. They chose their eldest son. Do you remember saying goodbye to your family? Yes. What do you remember from that? Handkerchiefs. I couldn't know at that point that I would never see my siblings or my parents again, nor my grandmother, and so forth and so on.

Guy Stern arrived in the U.S. alone at age 15, settling with an uncle in St. Louis. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stern, by then a college student, raced to enlist. I had an immediate visceral response to that, and that was, this is my war for many reasons, personal, of course, but also this country, I was really treated well. In New York, Paul Fairbrook had a similar impulse. Now 97, Fairbrook is the former dean of the Culinary Institute of America. His Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when he was 10. Why did you want to enlist initially? Look, I'm a German Jew, and there's nothing that I wanted more than to get some

revenge on Hitler who killed my uncles and my aunts and my cousins. And there was no question in my mind, and neither of all the men in Camp Ritchie, so many of them were Jewish, we were all on the same wavelength. We were delighted to get a chance to do something for the United States. At the time, though, the military wouldn't take volunteers who weren't born in the U.S., but within a few months, the government realized these so-called enemy aliens could be a valuable resource in the war. You can learn to shoot a rifle in six months, but you can't learn fluent

German in six months, and that's what the key to the success was. You really know an awful lot of the subtleties when you're having a conversation with another German, and we were able to find out things in their answers that enabled us to ask more questions. You really have to understand it helps to have been born in Germany in order to do a good job. Both refugees like Fairbrook and Stern, as well as a number of American-born recruits with requisite language skills, were drafted into the Army and sent to Camp Ritchie. How did you find out you were going to go to Camp Ritchie?

I was called to the company office and told, you're shipping out. And I said, may I know where I'm going? He said, no, military secret. They swore you to secrecy. Yes. Originally a resort, Camp Ritchie was a curiously idyllic setting to prepare for the harshness and brutality of war. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland,

it was away from prying eyes and prying spies, but close enough to decision-makers at the Pentagon. Give us a sense of the kinds of courses they took. Well, the most important part of the training was that they learned to do interrogation, in particular of prisoners of war, techniques where you want to get people to talk to you. You want to convince them that you're trustworthy. But they also did terrain analysis.

They also did photo analysis and aerial reconnaissance analysis. They did counterintelligence. This was really a broad range of intelligence activities. It was a very broad range, and they did it all generally in eight weeks. You describe it almost sounds like these were precursors to CIA agents. They were, in fact.

Some of them were trained as spies, and some of them went on to careers as spies. My parents were pacifists, so the idea of my going to war was for them calamitous. However, they realized that it was a necessary war, especially for us. Victor Brombert, now 97 years old, is a former professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Yale and then Princeton. He was born in Berlin to a Russian-Jewish family. When Hitler came to power, the Bromberts fled to France and then to the U.S.

Eager to fight the Nazis, he too joined the army. After recruiters found out he spoke four languages, they dispatched him to Camp Ritchie, where strenuous classroom instruction was coupled with strenuous field exercises. There were long and demanding exercises and close combat training, how to kill a sentry from behind. I thought, I'm never going to do that, but I was shown how to do it. So physical combat training as well as intelligence. Well, yes, with a stick, you sort of swing it around the neck from behind and then pull. Among the unusual sights at Ritchie, a team of U.S. soldiers dressed in German uniforms. The Ritchie boys trained for war against these fake Germans with

fake German tanks made out of wood. Another unusual sight, towering over recruits, Frank Levitt, a World War I veteran and pro-wrestling star at the time, was among the instructors. Training was designed to be as realistic as possible. The Ritchie Boys practiced street fighting in life-size replicas of German villages and questioned mock civilians in full-scale German homes. Some of the prisoners were actual German POWs brought to the camp so the Ritchie Boys could practice their interrogation techniques. I understand you had sparring partners, you play-acted. One had to play-act with some of the people who were acting as prisoners, and some of them were real prisoners.

By the spring of 1944, the Ritchie boys were ready to return to Western Europe, this time as naturalized Americans in American uniforms. Still, if they were captured, they knew what the Nazis would do to them. Some of them requested new dog tags, with very good reason. This dog tag says Hebrew. Did your dog tag identify you as Jewish? I preferred not having it. I asked them to leave it off. You didn't want to be identified as Jewish going back to Western Europe?

I knew that the contact with Germans might not be very nice. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allies launched one of the most sweeping military operations in history, a mighty onslaught of more than 160,000 men, 13,000 aircraft, and 5,000 vessels. We were on a PT boat taking off from Southampton, and we all were scared. We were briefed that the Germans were not going to welcome us greatly. As a Jew, I knew I might not be treated exactly by the Geneva rules. Divided into six-man teams, the Ritchie boys were attached to different army units. When they landed on the beaches of Normandy, Wehrmacht troops were waiting for them, well-armed and well-prepared.

Victor Bromberg was with the 1st American Armored Division to land on Omaha Beach. He is still haunted by what he experienced that day. I saw immense debris, wounded people, dead people. I remember being up on a cliff the first night over Omaha Beach, and we were strafed. And I said to myself, now it's the end, because I could feel the machine gun bullets. Is that when you first realized, I'm in a war here? Yes, I realized that I was afraid. I never calculated that there is such a thing as terror, fear. So I experienced viscerally fear. On the front lines from

Normandy onwards, the Ritchie Boys fought in every major battle in Europe, collecting tactical intelligence, interrogating prisoners and civilians, all in service of winning the war. In 1944, the Ritchie Boys headed to Europe to fight in a war that was, for them, intensely personal. They were members of a secret group whose mastery of the German language and culture helped them provide battlefield intelligence that proved pivotal to the Allies' victory. The Ritchie Boys landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and helped liberate Paris. They crossed into Germany with the Allied armies and witnessed the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

All the while, they tracked down evidence and interrogated Nazi criminals, later tried at Nuremberg. It was also in Europe that some of them, like Guy Stern, learned what had happened to the families they left behind. This is it. They're on the beach. By the summer of 1944, German troops in Normandy were outnumbered and overpowered. The Allies liberated Paris in August. The date was August 25th. And drove Nazi troops out of France. But Hitler was determined to continue the war. In the Ardennes region of Belgium, the Germans mounted a massive counteroffensive,

which became known as the Battle of the Bulge. I see a tent in the background of that photo right in front of you. Yes, that's my interrogation tent. So this is you on the job? You're in Belgium? I'm doing my job interrogating, right. Amid the chaos of war, Guy Stern and the other Ritchie boys had a job to do. Embedded in every army unit, they interrogated tens of thousands of captured Nazi soldiers as well as civilians, extracting key strategic information on enemy strength, troop movements, and defensive positions. They then typed up their daily reports in the field to be passed up the chain of command. Our interrogations had to do with tactical, immediate concerns.

And that's why civilians could be useful and soldiers could be useful. Where is the minefield? Very important, because you save life if you know where the minefield is. Where is the machine gun nest? How many machine guns do you have there? Where are your reserve units? And if you don't get it from one prisoner, you might get it from the other. 97-year-old Victor Brombert says they relied on their Camp Ritchie training to get people to open up.

We improvised according to the situation, according to the kind of unit, according to the kind of person we were interrogating. But certainly what did not work was violence or threat of violence. Never. What did work is complicity. What do you mean? By complicity, I mean, oh, we are together in this war. You on one side, we on this side. Isn't it a miserable thing? Aren't we all sort of tired of it? A shared experience. A shared experience, exactly.

Giving out some cigarettes also helps a lot. A friendly approach, trying to be human. The Ritchie boys connected with prisoners on subjects as varied as food and soccer rivalries, but they weren't above using deception on difficult targets. The Ritchie boys discovered that the Nazis were terrified of ending up in Russian captivity, and they used that to great effect. If a German POW wouldn't talk, he might face Guy Stern, dressed up as a Russian officer. I had my whole uniform with medals, Russian medals, and I gave myself the name Commissar Krukov. That's what you called yourself?

It was my pseudonym. How did you do, Commissar Krukov. That's what you called yourself? It was my pseudonym. How did you do, Commissar? Thank you for asking. I gave myself all the accoutrements of looking like a fierce Russian commissar, and some And some we didn't break, but 80% were so darn scared of the Russians and what they would do. So there's a real element of costumes and deception and accents. Yes, and it's theatrics in a way, yes. Their subjects range from low-level German soldiers to high-ranking Nazi officers, including Hans Goebbels, brother of Hitler's chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Another bit of indispensable Richie Boy handiwork, the Order of Battle of the German Army.

Paul Fairbrook helped write this compact manual, known as the Red Book, which outlined in great detail the makeup of virtually every Nazi unit, information every Ritchie boy committed to memory. When the soldiers said, I'm not going to talk, they could say, wait a minute, I know all about you. Look, I got a book here and it tells me that you were here and you were there and your boss was this. And they were impressed with that. So it sounds like this gave the officers in the field a guide to the German army so they could then interrogate the German POWs more efficiently.

That's exactly right. The Ritchie boys earned a reputation for delivering important tactical information fast, making a major contribution to every battle on the Western Front. Their work saved lives? Absolutely. They certainly saved lives. I think that that's quantifiable. David Fry teaches history to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Part of what the Ritchie boys did was to convince German units to surrender without fighting. And you're saying some of that originated at Camp Ritchie? Much of it originated at Camp Ritchie because it had never, it hadn't been done before.

How do you appeal to people in their own language? And knowing how to shape that appeal was pretty critical to the success of the mobile broadcast units. In trucks equipped with loudspeakers, Ritchie boys went to the front lines under heavy fire and tried, in German, to persuade their Nazi counterparts to surrender. They also drafted and dropped leaflets from airplanes behind enemy lines. This is one of the leaflets that was dropped out of the sky.

I have some that were shot. This one was our most effective leaflet. And why was that? Because Eisenhower had signed it, and the Germans had an incredibly naive approach to everything that was signed and sealed. And you think because it had that signature, somehow that certified it? Yes, it carried weight, and the belief in the printed matter was very great. That's the kind of thing you would know as a former German who understood the psychology and the mentality.

That's correct. Apart from the fighting, there were other threats confronting the Ritchie boys. Given their foreign accents, they were in particular danger of being mistaken for the enemy by their own troops, who instituted passwords at checkpoints. What happened to one of the Ritchie boys? At night, on the way to the latrine, he was asked for a password. He gave the name of the word by the password, but with a German accent. He was shot right away and killed.

Did you ever worry your accent might get you killed? Yes, of course. You know, I don't talk like an Alabama person or Texan. By the spring of 1945, Allied forces neared Berlin and Hitler took his

life in his underground bunker. Germany surrendered on May 8th of that year. What do you remember feeling that day? Elated. It was absolutely, we won, kid. And those are your comrades. Yes. Those are your guys.

Yes. But joy turned to horror as Allied soldiers and the world learned the full scale of the Nazi mass extermination. Guy Stern recalls arriving at Buchenwald concentration camp three days after its liberation alongside a fellow American sergeant. We were walking along and you saw these emaciated, horribly looking, close to death people. And so I fell back behind because I didn't want to be seen crying to a hardened soldier, and then he looked around to look where I was, how I was delayed, and he, this good fellow from middle of Ohio, was bawling just as I was. A few days later, Stern returned to his hometown, hoping to reunite with his family. But Hildesheim was now in ruins. A childhood friend described to Stern how his parents, younger brother and

sister, had been forced from their home and deported. They were killed either in Warsaw or in Auschwitz. None of my family survived. I was the only one to get out. Did you ever ask yourself, why me? Why were you the one that made it to the United States? Yes, even last night. And I said, well, in slang, there ain't nothing special about you. But if you were saved, you got to show that you were worthy of it. And that has been the driving force in my professional life. This is a way to honor your family that perished.

Yeah. After the war, Guy Stern, Victor Brombert, and Paul Fairbrook came home, married, and went to Ivy League schools on the GI Bill. Guy Stern became a professor for almost 50 years. They all rose to the top of their fields, as did a number of other Ritchie Boys, says history professor David Fry. I understand there's some Ritchie Boys became fairly prominent figures. There are a whole variety of prominent Ritchie Boys. It turns out author J.D. Salinger was a Ritchie Boy. So was Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, as was philanthropist David Rockefeller. Some became ambassadors. Some became critical figures in the creation of the CIA.

Others were actually really important in American science. So there's all sorts of impact years and years and years after the war from this camp in Maryland. It was not only that short-term impact on the battlefield, it was an impact on war crimes. They were critical in terms of arresting some of the major figures and gathering the evidence for Nuremberg, then shaping the Cold War era. They really played a significant role.

How do you think we should be recalling the Ritchie Boys? I think we look at this group and we see true heroes. We see those who are the greatest of the greatest generation. These are people who made massive contributions, who helped shape what it meant to be American, and who, in some cases, gave their lives in service to this country. This is a remarkable story. Why do so few Americans know

about this? Because it involves military intelligence, much of it was actually kept secret until the 1990s. A lot of what was learned and the methods used are important to keep secret, and only in the early 2000s did we begin to see reunions of the Ritchie boys. Now in their late 90s, these humble warriors still keep in touch, swapping stories about a chapter in American history now finally being told. What is it like when you get together and reflect on this experience going on 80 years ago? We always find another anecdote to tell. You have a smile on your face when you think back. Yes, this is what happens.

It was hard for us not to notice that Beyond the Stories runs a deep sense of pride. You bet your life I'm proud of the Ritchie boys. It was wonderful to be part of them. I was proud to be in the American Army, and we were able to do what we had to do. I don't think we're heroes, but the opportunity to help fight and win the war was a wonderful way.

I can look anybody straight in the eye, and I said, I think I've earned the right to be an American. And that's what it did for me. Streaming now on 60 Minutes Plus, correspondent Seth Doan dives below the Bay of Naples and deep into history, exploring the ancient, now sunken city of Baia, once the playground of ancient Rome's elite. He joins underwater archaeologist Barbara DeVide and her team

as they rediscover ancient Rome's Las Vegas. DeVide's underwater mapping has allowed them to create these 3D models to visualize the more than 400 acres of lavish villas and spas where Emperor Nero and Julius Caesar had homes. Baia was a seaside escape for the ultra-wealthy, with extravagant offerings, including fresh fish from private saltwater ponds. 60 Minutes Plus streams on Paramount Plus. I'm Anderson Cooper. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.