Trained at secret Camp Ritchie in Washington County, Maryland, many of the total 22,000 men and women in service were German-speaking immigrants to the United States, often Jews, who fled Nazi persecution.
[3] In addition to interrogation and counter-intelligence, they were trained in psychological warfare to study and demoralize the enemy, and they later served as prosecutors and translators in the Nuremberg trials.
Most of the men sent to Camp Ritchie for training were assigned there because of fluency in German, French, Italian, Polish, or other languages that were needed by the US Army during the war.
Members had been drafted into or volunteered to join the United States Army and, after their ability to speak an enemy language had been discovered, were sent to Camp Ritchie on secret orders.
[8] The role of the soldiers was, therefore, to work in the front lines, at strategic corps and army levels, at interrogation, analyzing German forces and plans, and to study and demoralize the enemy.
[9] During the Battle of the Bulge, two Ritchie Boys were recognized by their accents, and the German officer Curt Bruns then ordered them both to be summarily executed; he said, "The Jews have no right to live in Germany."
[12][13] By means of targeted disinformation by newspaper announcements, flyers, radio broadcasts, and sound trucks, the German population and military were encouraged to cease their resistance to the Allied invasion.
Camp Ritchie also trained over 500 Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) for PACMIRS (Pacific Military Intelligence Research Service), a program to translate documents the U.S. Navy captured in Saipan in July 1944.
One Nisei, Kazuo Yamane, digging into a crate, retrieved what he believed to be a textbook but soon discovered it to be meeting minutes from a gathering of all of Japan's armories.
[19][better source needed] Then museum director, Landon Grove, presented a number of talks and interviews, including several NPR discussions in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to spread the story of the soldiers.