Last November, when I spoke to the Hot Springs Women’s Club about Immigrant Soldier, I was asked two questions regarding the Ritchie Boys I had never fielded before. One of the ladies wanted to know how many, if any, Ritchie Boys were killed in action. Another lady inquired if any of the Ritchie-trained men were later discovered to have been German spies during the war, given their close ties to Germany and Austria.
I did not know the answers to either of these questions but assured the two women that I would find out what I could.
Naturally, I turned to Dan Gross, the unofficial archivist for the Ritchie Boys. He responded with just the information I needed.
Mr. Gross wrote to me saying, “My records show that thirty-nine Ritchie Boys died during the war. One in 1943 and the remainder in 1944 and 1945.” He included statistics that showed the cause of death for thirty-one of these men: twenty-two 22 killed in action, two died from wounds, and seven whose deaths were classified as accidents such as vehicle crashes or drowning. Three of the men killed in action received Silver Star Medals for exceptional bravery. Dan Gross said he did not know how many were wounded, received Bronze Star Medals, or became POWs themselves. He added, “Ritchie Boys were killed in action in many way: as parachutists, by snipers, etc. Also, two captured IPWs (interrogators of prisoners of war) were murdered because they were Jewish.”
I asked if he had more information about the murdered Ritchie Boys and he referred me to a book, Snow & Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45” by Peter Caddik-Adams and available online. Buried on page 535, I read this sad story.
On December 20, only one day into the Battle of the Bulge, a group of 106 Division American GIs were captured by a German Battalion of Volksgrenadiers. When these GIs were captured, they had in their custody a few Germans who they had earlier taken prisoner. These German soldiers now told the commander of the Volksgrenadiers that they had been interrogated while in custody by two Jewish-American soldiers from Berlin. They identified the Jewish Americans to the commander, a man by the name of Hauptman Kurt Bruns. He declared “the Jews have no right to live in Germany” and commanded they be executed. After the Germans were turned back and the Battle of the Bulge was over, the American Army made every effort to recover from the deep snow the bodies of fallen GIs . On February 13, 1945, the remains of Staff Sargent Kurt R. Jacobs and Technician 5th Grade Murry Zapler were discovered and identified. At a post-war trial for war criminals, Hauptman Bruns was sentenced to hang for their murders.
These men, and many Ritchie Boys, had obviously been loyal American soldiers and often heroes. But what of the other question asked of me? Had any of them been spies? Dan Gross wrote, “I haven’t heard of any Ritchie Boy being a German spy. Of course, some Ritchie Boys pretended to be German agents in order to get information. And quite a few joined the CIA.”
A few days later, Gross sent me information about two Ritchie Boys that had indeed become spies but not for the Germans. Kurt Ponger and Otto Verber were two Viennese-born brothers-in-law who were trained at Camp Ritchie and later became spies for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, a crime for which they were convicted.
Ponger was a Communist activist as early as 1936, an extremely dangerous ideology to have in Nazi Germany (as well as later in the United States during the McCarthy Era). In 1938, he was arrested by the SS and imprisoned in both Dachau and Buchenwald. His fate was not as lethal as that of Herman’s cousin who was imprisoned in Dachau for the same crime – being a communist – and died there. Ponger, a good deal luckier, was released after about a year and immediately fled to Britain where he became involved with a Communist Party cell there. In Britain he was also reunited with his Viennese girlfriend, Vera, and the lovers traveled together to the United States where her younger brother, Otto Verber, had immigrated the year before.
The two men, now brothers-in-law, attended Camp Ritchie in 1943 and became intelligence agents. Kurt Ponger was recruited by the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services and the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA), while Verber served on an IPW team. After the war, the men worked with the Office of the Chief Council of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as interrogators of war crimes suspects and witnesses. This was the same job that Herman held at the same time–a coincidence that makes it very likely he knew both Ponger and Verber. In 1948, when Herman returned to the United States with his new bride, the brothers-in-law, Ponger and Verber, returned to their home-town of Vienna. There they started an undercover literary agency and began to supply the Soviets with information about Austrian politics and policy. In 1953, during the height of the McCarthy Era, they were arrested for espionage in the United States and each served a prison term, after which they returned to Austria. No more is known of them.
With the clarity of history, it is difficult to declare Ponger and Verber as anything but idealistic men who were tossed about by the political movements of the twentieth century – first the Nazis, then the Cold War and McCarthyism. In between, though always Communists, they loyally served the Allies (keep in mind this included the Russians) during World War II.
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