When 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.”
Dr. 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,” Dr. Stern later said, describing the reception that awaited many refugees during World War II.
In the end, his family remained trapped in Germany, and Dr. Stern alone among them survived the Holocaust. He was 101 when he died on Dec. 7 at a hospital in West Bloomfield, Mich.
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, Dr. 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.
In recent decades, Dr. Stern drew the interest of historians, documentarians, students and scholars seeking to learn and 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, Md. Of the 20,000 soldiers in their ranks, several thousand were Jewish refugees of Nazi Europe whose linguistic skills proved vital to U.S. interrogation and intelligence-gathering during the war.
Dr. Stern also 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.
“We were at the tail end of the window of time,” Novick said in an interview, “when it would be possible to find people who remembered this history from living it.”
Günther Stern was born on Jan. 14, 1922, in Hildesheim, in northern Germany. His father was a traveling textile salesman, and his mother assisted him in his work while raising Dr. Stern, his brother and his sister.
Dr. Stern turned 11 two weeks before Hitler became chancellor in 1933. As the Nazi regime intensified its campaign of antisemitic persecution, his father lost much of his business, and Jewish students at Dr. Stern’s school were bullied and attacked.
His parents resolved to leave Germany and decided that, as the oldest child, Dr. Stern would go first. With help from a Jewish aid group in the United States and an uncle in St. Louis, the family managed to arrange for him — but only him — to sail to America in 1937.
Dr. Stern tried to raise the funds to bring his parents and siblings 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.
Dr. 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.
By the end of the war, more than 60 percent of the “actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield” was collected by their members, David Frey, the founding director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2021.
“We were fighting an American war, and we were also fighting an intensely personal war,” Dr. Stern reflected years later. “We were in that war with every inch of our being.”
Dr. Stern landed in Normandy three days after the D-Day invasion in June 1944. He served in France, Belgium and Germany and was credited with interrogating thousands of German prisoners during the war.
Dr. Stern often teamed with a fellow soldier during interrogations in a good-cop-bad-cop routine. Playing the “bad cop,” Dr. Stern posed as a Soviet official — one Commissar Krukov, complete with uniform, medals and a convincing Russian accent — to stoke fears in tight-lipped POWs that they might be sent to a Soviet gulag if they failed to cooperate.
Dr. Stern, who reached the rank of master sergeant, received the Bronze Star Medal for his service during the war, with a citation that credited him with providing information of “inestimable value.”
In one instance, he interrogated a German corporal who revealed the deaths of two Americans POWs who had been selected by their Nazi captors for execution because they were Jewish refugees of Germany.
Dr. Stern’s report on the interrogation helped lead to a war crimes investigation and the execution of the perpetrator soon after the war, according to Stephen Goodell, a retired director of exhibitions at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and a scholar of the Ritchie Boys.
Dr. Stern entered Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp in Germany, days after it was liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945. Gazing upon the skeletal survivors, he slipped a few paces behind a fellow soldier so that the man would not see him crying. But when that soldier looked back to find him, Dr. Stern saw that he, too, was weeping.
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Stern returned to Hildesheim and found the city reduced to rubble. An old friend told him of his family’s deportation.
“I felt as though an axe had severed me from my roots,” Dr. Stern later wrote. “My assumptions or dreams about my future life had been illusions. I held on to what little was left.”
Dr. Stern said that throughout his life, he felt a responsibility to demonstrate that he had been worthy of survival. He studied Romance languages at Hofstra University on Long Island, from which he graduated in 1948. At Columbia University, he received a master’s degree in 1950 and a PhD in 1954, both in German.
He taught at Denison University and the University of Cincinnati, both in Ohio, and at the University of Maryland before joining Wayne State University in 1978. During a quarter-century at the school, he served as provost, senior vice president for academic affairs, and professor of German literature and cultural history.
He traced his interest in German literature to his parents, who had often taken him to the theater in Hildesheim.
“My parents, had they been allowed to live, would have been elated by my choice of career and their catalytic role in it,” he wrote in his memoir, “Invisible Ink,” published in 2020.
“That saddens me, of course, but that regret is as nothing compared to my torment when I imagine how they, lovers of the German language, probably heard it in its most debased form in the moments before their deaths at the hands of their murderers.”
Citing the words of a friend, Dr. Stern wrote, “I hate the language that I love.”
Dr. Stern’s marriage to Margith Langweiler ended in divorce. Their son, Mark Stern, died in 2006. Dr. Stern’s second wife, Judith Edelstein Owens, died in 2003 after 23 years of marriage.
Susanna Piontek of West Bloomfield, Dr. Stern’s wife of 17 years, was his only immediate survivor. She confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Dr. Stern worked for years with the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Mich., where he was a member of the board and, until his death, director of the International Institute of the Righteous.
He spoke frequently to the public about his time as a refugee, his inability to save his family and his service with the Ritchie Boys — memories, he once remarked, that had long been “sequestered in secret chambers of our hearts and minds.”
“We have seen the nadir of human behavior, and we have no guarantee that it won’t recur,” Dr. Stern said in a closing sequence of “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” “If we can make that clear and graphic, and understandable, not as something to imitate, but as a warning of what can happen to human beings, then, perhaps, we have one shield against its recurrence.”
