Camp Ritchie
Camp Ritchie (official name: Military Intelligence Training Center) was a US Army training camp in Maryland , USA , near Washington, DC. Its name honors a former governor of Maryland, Albert C. Ritchie . In 1926 the land was purchased and the barracks were first moved into by the National Guard's 5th Infantry on July 9, 1927 . The buildings then went to the federal government. In this camp, among other things, the secret unit of the Ritchie Boys was trained; These were young Germans who wanted to take up the fight against the Nazi dictatorship in the US Army . A total of around 19,000 soldiers are thought to have been trained between 1942 and 1945 . Around 80 percent of these were not US citizens .
Most of the Camp Ritchie documents were held in the US National Archives in St. Louis . In a 1973 fire, nearly 80 percent of the documents were destroyed.
literature
- Robert Lackner: Camp Ritchie and his Austrians , Böhlau 2020, ISBN 9783205210092
- Florian Traussnig: The psycho warriors from Camp Sharpe: Austrians as combat propagandists in the US Army in World War II , Böhlau 2020, ISBN 9783205210191
Web links
- Fort Ritchie Background ( Memento from February 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Franklin, Joshua: Victim Soldiers: German-Jewish Refugees in the American Armed Forces during World War II ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , 2006, page 53 ff
Coordinates: 39 ° 42 ′ 2.5 ″ N , 77 ° 30 ′ 9.6 ″ W.