Joining the ranks of Band of Brothers, Unbroken, and Boys in the Boat, is the little-known saga of young German Jews, dubbed The Ritchie Boys, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, came of age in America, and returned to Europe at enormous personal risk as members of the U.S. Army to play a key role in the Allied victory. It’s an extraordinary story, well-told in the books SON AND SOLDIERS, the author, Bruce Henderson, one of my guests on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show. And another powerful story of World War II is the subject of the second half-hour when David King, the author of THE TRIAL OF ADOLF HITLER: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany sits down with me.

In 1942, the U.S. Army unleashed one of its greatest secret weapons in the battle to defeat Adolf Hitler: training nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and making use of their mastery of the German language, history, and customs. Known as the Ritchie Boys, they were sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they interrogated German POWs and gathered crucial intelligence that saved American lives and helped win the war. Though they knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured, they eagerly joined the fight to defeat Hitler. As they did, many of them did not know the fates of their own families left behind in occupied Europe. In SONS AND SOLDIERS, Bruce Henderson draws on personal interviews with many surviving veterans and extensive archival research to bring this never-before-told chapter of the Second World War to light.

THE TRIAL OF ADOLF HITLER, The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany by New York Times bestselling author and historian David King begins on February 26, 1924 when ten defendants gathered in a packed Munich courtroom to begin their trial for high treason. All ten were members or allies of the Nazi Party. Four months prior, they had attempted a coup at a rowdy meeting in a local beer hall, an event quickly dubbed “the Beer Hall Putsch” by the press. The coup failed, ending in a massacre of Nazis at the hands of
the state police. The trial was widely expected to sound the death knell for the Nazi Party. Instead Hitler and the party emerged more driven, popular, and powerful than before, launching the Nazi Party on its way to national and international importance, solidifying the power and popularity of the trial’s unlikely star defendant: the ‘everyman’ hero, Adolf Hitler.

Move over Band of Brothers when The Halli Casser-Jayne Show brings you the little known story of the Ritchie Boys and the story of Adolf Hitler’s rise. The podcast will be posted at Halli Casser-Jayne dot com.