Guy Stern, Holocaust refugee who interrogated Nazi POWs, dies at 101

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Guy Stern's father grasped the danger that awaited Jewish families like theirs and offered his son an admonition: "You have to be like invisible ink," he said. "You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, the invisible ink will become visible again."

Stern  was 15 when his parents sent him by himself to live with an uncle in the United States. They hoped to join him and to bring their two younger children. But the "golden door was not wide open," Stern later said.

In the end, his family remained trapped in Germany, and Stern alone among them survived the Holocaust. Stern, who spent some of his younger years studying on Long Island, was 101 when he died on Dec. 7 at a hospital in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

He never forgot his father's words about invisible ink. They were a warning, but also a promise — that "better times" would come, and that when they did, Stern would leave a mark.

He did, first as one of the "Ritchie Boys" recruited to a secret U.S. military intelligence program that helped defeat Nazi Germany, and later, after the war, as a professor of German literature and culture, his attention ever tuned to the stories of exiles and immigrants.

Stern, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, resumed his studies after the war at what was then Hofstra College. In his autobiography, “Invisible,” he wrote that he “loved attending Hofstra.” He became features editor of the Hofstra Chronicle and an associate editor of the yearbook.

“I have looked back on those two years at Hofstra, 1946-1948, with both pleasure and amazement,” Stern wrote. “What drove me to that ceaseless activity in both Hempstead and New York? The answer was not hard to find. The news from Germany and the demise of my entire family was descending on me with disturbing frequency. All those campus activities, though valuable in themselves, also served to drive away the demons.”

He graduated from Hofstra in 1948, having earned a bachelor of arts degree in romance languages. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university in 1998.

Stern drew the interest of historians and scholars seeking to preserve the history of the Holocaust.

He appeared in the 2004 film "The Ritchie Boys," a documentary about the men — and women — so named for their training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Several thousand soldiers were Jewish refugees of Nazi Europe whose linguistic skills proved vital to U.S. intelligence-gathering during the war.

Stern was featured prominently in "The U.S. and the Holocaust," the three-part documentary directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein that aired last year on PBS.

Günther Stern was born on Jan. 14, 1922, in Hildesheim, in northern Germany. He turned 11 two weeks before Hitler became chancellor in 1933. His parents resolved to leave Germany and decided that, as the oldest child, Stern would go first. The family managed to arrange for him — but only him — to sail to America in 1937.

Stern tried to raise the funds to bring his family to the United States, but the bureaucratic morass proved impenetrable. The last letter he received from them, in 1942, informed him that they had been deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. He never learned if they died there or in a Nazi death camp.

Stern completed high school in St. Louis and was drafted into the Army in 1943. He was chosen for the military intelligence school at Camp Ritchie because of his fluency in German.

The "Ritchie Boys" — a name they acquired long after the war — trained in areas including interrogation, aerial reconnaissance, counterintelligence and psychological warfare.

Stern landed in Normandy three days after the D-Day invasion in June 1944. He was credited with interrogating thousands of German prisoners during the war. He received the Bronze Star for his service during the war. 

Stern's marriage to Margith Langweiler ended in divorce. Their son, Mark Stern, died in 2006. Stern's second wife, Judith Edelstein Owens, died in 2003 after 23 years of marriage.

Susanna Piontek of West Bloomfield, Stern's wife of 17 years, was his only immediate survivor. She confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.

With Craig Schneider