60 Minutes - 9/5/2021: The Last Pandemic, The Ritchie Boys

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

On this week's "60 Minutes," Bill Whitaker reports on the Pentagon projects that helped combat COVID-19 and may help end pandemics forever. The Ritchie Boys were responsible for uncovering more than half the combat intelligence on the Western Front during World War II. For the many German-born Jews in their ranks, defeating the Nazis was heartbreakingly personal. Jon Wertheim has their story. 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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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The DARPA director was very clear. Your mission is to take pandemics off the table. Sounds impossible. Of course. And that was the beauty of the DARPA model. We challenge the research community to come up with solutions that may sound like science fiction. And we're very willing to take chances with high-risk investments that may not work. But if they do, we can completely transform the landscape. 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. 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 tonight on 60 Minutes. It might surprise you to learn that many of the innovations deployed to counter the coronavirus were once obscure Pentagon-funded projects to defend soldiers from contagious diseases and biological weapons. The life-saving vaccine developed in record time owes a debt to these programs. To learn more, we met the man who's been leading the rapid vaccine effort, retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an Army infectious disease physician who, as we first reported in April, spent years with the Secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, working on technology he hopes will ensure COVID-19 is the last pandemic.

If we want to say we can never let this happen again, we're going to have to go even faster next time. Eight years ago, Dr. Hepburn was recruited by DARPA. The DARPA director was very clear. Your mission is to take pandemics off the table. Sounds impossible. Of course. And that was the beauty of the DARPA model.

We challenge the research community to come up with solutions that may sound like science fiction. And we're very willing to take chances with high-risk investments that may not work. But if they do, we can completely transform the landscape. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. More than 60 years ago, DARPA was born, after President Eisenhower was caught off guard when Russia launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. I ask you, sir, what are we going to do about it?

The small Defense Department agency was given a single purpose, prevent surprises like that from ever happening again. So Dr. Hepburn finds academics, companies, inventors working in garages, and pushes them to deliver. What we don't do, we don't say, OK, here's our problem, here's your blank check, come back to us in three to five years, we'll see how you do. You're on them. Active program management is what we call it. Dr. Hepburn showed us a few current projects. Some sound like they're from an episode of Star Trek.

Consider a ship like the USS Theodore Roosevelt, hobbled last year when 1,271 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. What if everyone on board had their health monitored with this subdermal implant, now in late-stage testing? It's not some dreaded government microchip to track your every move, but a tissue-like gel engineered to continuously test your blood. It's a sensor. This tiny green thing in there? That tiny green thing in there, you put it underneath your skin, and what that tells you is that there are chemical reactions going on inside the body, and that signal means you're going to have symptoms tomorrow.

Wow. There's an actual transmitter in that? Yeah, it's like a check engine light. Check this sailor out before he infects other people. That's right. Sailors would get the signal, then self-administer a blood draw and test themselves on site. Look at that. We can have that information in three to five minutes. As you truncate that time, as you diagnose and treat, what you do is you stop the infection in its tracks.

MILES O' The coronavirus has infected more than 300,000 Defense Department personnel and their dependents around the world. With the death toll rising, the Pentagon has been jump-starting programs that might save lives. This is a filter that you can put on a dialysis machine. Patient 16, a military spouse, was in the ICU near death with organ failure and septic shock when she was entered into a Defense Department COVID-19 study. Her family allowed us to witness the experimental four-day treatment. She's liberated from vasoactive medications and her septic shock resolved.

We also see improvements in her markers of inflammation and those are all positive prognostic signs. You pass someone's blood through this. You pass it through. Takes the virus out. Takes the virus out and puts the blood back in. Within days, patient 16 made a full recovery. The FDA has authorized the filter for emergency use. So far, doctors have used it to treat nearly 300 critically ill patients. These are all of the COVID-19 autopsy samples that we've received since the pandemic began. DARPA isn't the only Pentagon agency on the front lines. Colonel Joel Moncur directs the Joint Pathology Center in D.C. He leads an elite group of medical detectives who study tissue samples from soldiers and sailors

infected with pathogens all over the world, like this damaged lung of a recent COVID-19 victim. This is something we call diffuse salveolar damage, and it really interferes with the ability for them to get enough oxygen in their lungs. The center's century-old repository, the world's largest, houses tens of millions of tissue blocks preserved in wax, thin-sliced for close observation on glass slides. This biomedical treasure trove is being digitized using artificial intelligence. Amongst these are tissue samples from people who died from the Spanish flu pandemic. Dr. Moncur is examining the current pandemic

through the lens of the past. The 1918 Spanish flu took more American soldiers' lives in World War I than were killed in combat. The military never forgot. This is from the 1918 pandemic. My God. It is. And the scientific community needed to understand why it was so deadly. And this tissue was invaluable because it allowed us to characterize the virus at a genetic level. And from there, some incredible experiments happened that allowed the virus to actually be reconstructed. In 2005, scientists at the tissue repository, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and the CDC made headlines around the world when they resurrected the deadly 1918 virus. That's when Dr. James Crowe, an infectious disease researcher at Vanderbilt, joined the team. He went

looking for survivors of the 1918 flu, hunting for live human antibodies, the proteins manufactured by our bodies to fight disease. And lo and behold, if we took blood cells out of these nearly 100-year-old people, they still had immune cells that were circulating in their body that had reacted in 1918 influenza. That was one of those moments for me when I just said, wow, that's very powerful and interesting. So you find the antibodies in survivors who are almost 100 years old or more. Then what? Well, once we have the genetic sequence, which is the DNA sequence,

it's a string of letters that encodes the antibody. Essentially, we have the recipe to make it again. And now we have a drug substance that we can use to prevent or treat that infection. Dr. Crow and CDC scientists infected lab animals with the deadly 1918 virus and cured them. And what happened? Well, the antibody, like a heat-seeking missile, floats around in the animal, finds the virus, latches onto the virus, and inactivates, stops in its tracks. For us, after we had done that, we realized, wow, your body is a library of everything you've ever seen.

Then we started thinking, as medical researchers, we could find the cure to virtually anything that had ever occurred on the planet. In 2017, Dr. Crow entered a DARPA grant competition to produce antibody antidotes fast enough to stop a pandemic. Dr. Matt Hepburn described the program at a TED Talk last year. 20,000 doses in 60 days. Basically, we're talking about engineering antibodies that are so effective that you get near-immedi immediate protection once they're administered. And you interrupt transmission in those communities.

If you can interrupt it, then potentially you can head off the pandemic. When we first saw the grant call that was inviting people to respond, we thought it was ridiculous. We were getting antibodies in six to 24 months, which we thought was pretty spectacular. And they put the call out for 60 days. And we just said, that can't be done. For us at DARPA, if the experts are laughing at you and saying it's impossible, you're in the right space. So are you actually sitting there 60 days? You set a stopwatch? Yes. We say, here's your money, but then here's the stopwatch. We're going to do a capability demonstration.

Jargon words. But what it means is stopwatch and show us how fast you can go. Don't be fooled by that smile. Dr. Hepburn is a hard taskmaster. Stopwatch in hand, he set up a simulated Zika virus outbreak. He gave Dr. Crow $28 million and his first challenge, test every cell in a vial of survivor's blood and find a cure. They did in 78 days. We're used to getting all A's and, you know, Matt was kind of giving us a C for effort.

We were preparing to do a simulated sprint number two. And in the middle of that, COVID happened. And so DARPA turned to us and said, no more simulations. This is real. We need you to deliver antibodies for COVID. Dr. Crow's team at Vanderbilt quarantined in the lab and worked round the clock to find life-saving antibodies in the blood of COVID survivors. We have to do experiments that are a little bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. We take their blood and we look through millions and millions of cells. You can see that there's positive right here because it's starting to glow. You have a library of immunity in your body to everything you've ever seen.

So we have to look through those and find the ones for the particular virus of interest and pull them out. That's the needle in the haystack. That's the needle, exactly. Dr. Crow's lab delivered an antibody treatment to drugmaker AstraZeneca in a record 25 days. Others funded by the government's pandemic response program also shattered Matt Hepburn's 60-day mark, including biotech company Abcelera working with Eli Lilly, and Regeneron, which was used to treat President Trump. This is the new normal. It's going to be 60 days from here on out.

Well, not quite yet. Currently, antibodies are grown in a bioreactor like this one at this Defense Department rapid response plant in Florida. It'll take three weeks for this to produce 7,500 doses. And so a lot of scientists are trying to figure out, can this be done faster? Dr. Crow has successfully tested a faster way, RNA, the genetic tool DARPA helped pioneer that was used to make the coronavirus vaccine in record time. In the next outbreak, RNA would allow factories like this to churn out millions of doses a day. We would start from a blood sample from a survivor and be done with all of this and be giving you an injection of the cure within the 60 days. With their promise of speed, immediate protection, and a cure, Dr. Hepburn says RNA

antibodies could stop the next Wuhan-like outbreak cold. It's really beyond vaccines. That's our future. That's our next step. Shoot for the moon. Shoot for the moon. Some Pentagon researchers are shooting higher. With the spread of dangerous new coronavirus variants, the Army's Dr. Kayvon Majarid is testing a revolutionary approach to stop them all. We're trying to not just make a vaccine for this virus. We're trying to make a vaccine for the whole family of coronaviruses. This is the core of our vaccine. We engineer the spike so that we can attach it to this protein. If his concept, now in clinical trials, proves successful, Dr. Majarad says in five years,

a single vaccine could defeat all coronaviruses. That means many common colds, the deadly strain causing this pandemic, and thousands of others. Is that, at this point, a dream? This is not science fiction. This is science fact. We have the tools, we have the technology to do this all right now. And you think we can at some point inoculate the world against these killer viruses? Killer viruses that we haven't seen or even imagined will be protected against. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. As we first reported in May, the Richie 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. Sixty 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 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 is 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. Physical combat training as well as intelligence. 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. When we come back, we'll hear about some of the surprising ways they forged connections with the enemy in order to extract strategic information. 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. This is 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, it 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?

The shared experience. The 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 Richie 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? Thank you for asking. I gave myself all the accoutrements of looking like a fierce Russian commissar. 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 Ritchie 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 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 rich boys? At night, on the way to the latrine, he was asked for a password. He gave the name, the word, the password, but with a German accent. He was shot right away and he was 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 a 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 Richie boys. It turns out author J.D. Salinger was a Richie 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. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with the 54th season premiere of 60 Minutes.