Emeritus Professor Arno Mayer Honored at Holocaust Museum

Mayer represented the surviving Ritchie Boys as they were honored with the Elie Wiesel Award

Emeritus professor Arno Mayer, pictured with Gen. Mark Milley ’80, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Mark Bernstein
By Mark F. Bernstein ’83

Published June 28, 2022

3 min read

When emeritus professor Arno Mayer joined the U.S. Army in 1944, he wanted to serve his adopted country. He did not anticipate that doing so would involve taking some of the top Nazi rocket scientists Christmas shopping.

Mayer was one of the famed Ritchie Boys, European-born U.S. soldiers who trained in counterintelligence at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. (Fellow Princeton professor Victor Brombert was another.) In May, he represented the surviving Ritchie Boys at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as they were honored with the Elie Wiesel Award, the museum’s highest honor. Gen. Mark Milley ’80, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered the keynote address.

Born in Luxembourg, Mayer and his family fled the Nazis and emigrated to the United States in 1941. Just days before V-E Day, he was assigned to Camp Ritchie, where several hundred soldiers with European backgrounds had worked interrogating German POWs. When the war in Europe ended, Mayer was assigned to an equally secret project, known as Operation Paperclip, at Camp Hunt in Virginia, where Wernher Von Braun and other captured V-2 scientists had been transported as the United States tried to ensure that their knowledge would not be passed to the Soviet Union. The site was so secret that it was known only by its address, P.O. Box 1142, and the windows on the bus taking Mayer and his fellow soldiers there were covered with plywood. 

“As a Jewish refugee from Europe, that was about as big an assignment as you could get,” Mayer recalls in Camp Confidential, a 2021 Netflix animated documentary about Operation Paperclip. The film won a Critics Choice award and was shortlisted for an Oscar.

Mayer was named “morale officer”; his responsibilities included providing the German scientists with liquor, cigarettes, and whatever else was needed to keep them happy. Cozying up to people he viewed as war criminals was difficult, but Mayer did his duty. “It was unpleasant, to put it mildly,” he says in the film. 

The Germans, in turn, referred to Mayer as “the little Jew boy” behind his back, but Mayer exacted revenge where he could. When they asked to be taken Christmas shopping to buy gifts for their wives back in war-ravaged Germany, Mayer deliberately took them to a Jewish-owned department store in Washington. One of the items on their shopping list was underwear. Mayer took them to the lingerie department, where a salesclerk showed them a selection of lacy nylon panties. “Good heavens, no!” Von Braun barked back, in German. “Made of wool and with longer legs!”

Like others stationed at P.O. Box 1142, Mayer was sworn to secrecy; the U.S. government did not even reveal the existence of Operation Paperclip until the early 2000s. When his parents asked what he was doing, Mayer would reply archly, “I am preparing the Third World War.” Thanks in part to their work, however, German rocket technology did not fall into Soviet hands, and Von Braun was later instrumental in developing the U.S. space program.

At the Wiesel ceremony, Mayer, now 95, and another ex-Ritchie Boy, Gideon Kantor, were escorted to the stage by members of the Third Infantry, which traditionally escorts the president to state functions. In his remarks, Milley noted that he took Mayer’s European history class as a Princeton undergraduate and received a B- (“though it should have been an A,” the general quipped). Turning serious, Milley remarked that, as members of the U.S. armed forces, Mayer and his comrades “swore an oath to a document, to the Constitution of the United States of America. And that is an idea that the Ritchie Boys were willing to die for, the idea that is America.”

After being discharged from the Army in July 1946 and receiving a good-conduct medal for his service, Mayer went on to earn a Ph.D. at Yale and joined the Princeton faculty in 1962, where he earned recognition as one of the leading scholars of postwar European history. Although Mayer had hoped to fight Nazis, says his son, Carl Mayer ’81, “He came to realize that the intelligence they gathered saved thousands of lives and that they had done a great deal of good.”

2 Responses

Lawrence G. Kelley ’68

2 Years Ago

Your article on Arno Mayer and others’ receipt of the Elie Wiesel Award mentions professor emeritus Victor Brombert (the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures from 1975-99) as a fellow Ritchie Boy but omits another faculty member in this category: Walter Arnold Kaufmann. Kaufmann was, inter alia, a world-renowned expert on Nietzsche who taught in the philosophy department from 1947 until his death in 1980. Regrettably, popular interest in the contribution, dedication, and remarkably successful later careers of the roughly 15,000 Ritchie Boys arose only in recent decades. Its members represented quite an accomplished group; they deserved more recognition than they received. During my student years their actions were virtually unknown, except to specialists.

Norman Ravitch *62

2 Years Ago

Professor Mayer’s works of scholarship remind us that history is not entirely out of the realm of the subjective. He chose to emphasize the anti-Communism of Hitler and National Socialism rather than the anti-Semitism of the movement. Some saw this as too leftist an interpretation, others as a necessary re-evaluation of Nazi belief. Certainly the Germans before and during the Third Reich were more afraid of Communism than of Jews. Hitler seems to have combined the two fears in his insistence that the Soviet Union was run by Jews. He also had a respect for Stalin and viewed him as a fellow anti-Semite. Professor Mayer's works remain very useful. And the Holocaust Museum has given him its approval. In general, the rise of Fascism after World War I was very much the result of the fear of Bolshevism — the fear of Jews only as the falsely alleged leadership of Bolshevism.

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