The Quiet Contingent: An Addendum to WWII: The Boys of Camp Ritchie

Sample Entries

This book is a compendium of over 400 biographies of Ritchie Boys; members of a secret Psychological Warfare division active during WWII. Many of these soldiers were German-Jewish refugees, and some heralded from highly influential American families, such as the Roosevelts and Rockefellers. They interrogated Axis prisoners up to the highest ranks, some engaged in Black Propaganda and spy craft, whereas others were involved in the Nuremberg Trials and more.

Post-war, we follow these men’s lives into many walks of life, from major academic institutions to the highest levels of government, business, industry, entertainment and more. In many cases, their stories are told in their own words, providing us with a collection of fresh perspectives on events leading to, during, and after WWII.

Below are some sample entries from the book, now available at Amazon here.

Henry J. Abraham

Abraham was born on the 25th of August, 1921 to Jewish parents in Offenbach am Main, Germany. He elementary and high schools in Frankfurt until the age of 15, when his mother opted to send him to the USA after the National Socialists came to power. He left alone in 1937, and attended high school in Pittsburgh in 1939, and was later joined by his parents.

Abraham worked as a stock clerk for May, Stern & Co. until he was drafted in to the US Army in 1942. After basic training in Fort Eustis in Virginia, he entered the ASTP and was sent to Kenyon College for language training. At the end of his language training, he was sent to the Signal Corps and then for IPW training at the MITC, Camp Ritchie. From there, he was sent to the European Theatre and served in England, Belgium, Holland, France, and Germany.

Whilst in Europe he was mostly assigned to interrogations of prisoners of war, until he reached Berlin, where he worked at the Berlin Documents Centre, which was headed up by fellow Ritchie Boy Kurt Rosenow. Many of the documents that the soldiers processed were sent to the office of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. For his time in the army, Abraham was awarded two Battle Stars and a Commendation Medal.

Abraham was discharged in 1946, following which he used his GI Bill to go back to education. He completed two summer schools at Columbia College, and was awarded his undergraduate degree in Political Science from Kenyon College summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with highest honors in 1948. His classmates included the Jewish actor Paul Newman, comedian Jonathan Winters and Olof Palme, the latter of whom would go on to become the Prime Minister of Sweden (later assassinated).

From there, Abraham received his master’s degree in Public Law and Government from Columbia University in 1949, and then a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1952.

He received Pennsylvania University’s first social science undergraduate teaching award in 1959, and then spent a year in Denmark on a Fulbright Scholarship, working in the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, installing the country’s first Department of Political Science. He became a full professor in 1962 at Pennsylvania.

After 23 years at Pennsylvania, he moved with his family to Charlottesville in 1972, where he became a chaired professor at the University of Virginia in Government and Foreign Affairs. He spent much of his academic career lecturing throughout the world as a member of the United States Information Agency (USIA).

Over the course of his life, Abraham taught over 20,000 students, and came to know 25 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 11 of them as quasi-professional acquaintances and four as intimate friends, including the late Lewis Powell, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and William J. Brennan Jr. When Abraham retired, Scalia sent him a signed group photo of the Justices telling him that they strived to be worth as much respect as Abraham.

He also taught many notable people, including US Senator Arlen Specter, Judge Edward Roy Becker (US Third Circuit Court of Appeals), Judge Susan J. Dlott (Chief Judge, US District Court in Ohio), Judge Charles R. Weiner (US District Court in Pennsylvania), Judge John Roll (US District Court in Arizona) , Judge Mark S. Davis US District Court in Virginia) , Chief Justice Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr. (Virginia Supreme Court), Judge Stefan R. Underhill (US District Court in Connecticut), Justice Elizabeth B. Lacy (Virginia Supreme Court), professor Larry J. Sabato, Pennsylvania State Rep. Mark B. Cohen, and many others. He also stayed in touch with 20-odd faithful students who dubbed themselves with the moniker ‘The Tribe of Abraham’. He wrote over 13 books and numerous publications, all involving law and analyzing the legal frameworks of America.

He was also the recipient of many awards, including; the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Award, the first Lifetime Achievement Award of the Organized Section on Law and Courts of the American Political Science Association, the Distinguished Service Award of the Virginia Social Science Association, the Kite and Key Service Award, the “Z” Society’s Distinguished Faculty Award, the University of Virginia’s Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award, the ‘IMP’ Society’s Outstanding Contribution to the University Community Award, the Templeton Honor Roll for Education in a Free Society Award and the 2007 Annual Award for ‘Americanism’ from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In 2017, he made the news after the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville. He spoke to the press of his fear of watching vocal white nationalists in the streets. He told them; “What really hurt me and bothered me so much was the language that was used, the utilization of all that is evil in terms of the language”[1] and added to his friend (And ‘Tribe of Abraham’ member) Barbara Perry; “I can’t believe I’m living it gain.”[2]  He spoke of how it reminded him of an uppercut he had once received as a child in a schoolyard, which had prompted him to switch to a Jewish school in Germany.

He passed away on February 26th, 2020. Following his passing donations were suggested in his honor to the Anti-defamation League, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The American Society of Yad Vashem.

Frank M. Brandstetter

Brandstetter was born Maryan Franciscus Otto Josephus Wladyslaw Brandstetter Drag-Sas Hubicki on the 26th of March, 1912 to Austrian-Hungarian Nobility in Nagyszeben, Romania. His father, Ferenc Brandstetter was part of the Hungarian Hussar Cavalry. His mother, Baroness Maria Louisa Drag-Sas Hubicki was of Polish- Austrian nobility.

With the outbreak of WWI, Ferenc was sent to serve on the Eastern Front and a young Brandstetter was briefly raised by his mother, and then transferred to a boarding school run by the Sisters of Charity. Maria Louisa bore a second child, a daughter Marine. Following the war, the family lost much of their generational wealth and noble status.

In 1919, Brandstetter’s parents divorced and his father lost his ability to work in any military capacity due to the restrictions on Hungarians. He soon found work operating a minor newspaper, which was under surveillance by Communists. In 1921, Brandstetter enrolled in the Maria Theresa Military Academy (today known as the TherMilAk). This was interrupted by a year of being placed with a Communist working class family, followed by a placement in a Gymnasium in Freistadt, Austria.

In 1924, he was enrolled in the Royal Magyar Hunyadi Mátyás Educational Institute, another military academy. In 1926, Ferenc Brandstetter was arrested due to his activities with his newspaper, which was connected to several rebellious land owners in Hungary. Thanks to the friendship he had with a former schoolmate, General Gyula Gömbös de Jákfa, Ferenc was able to avoid punishment and secured a visa to escape to the USA. Gömbös would later become the Prime Minster of Hungary.

In 1928, Ferenc sent his son a round-trip ticket to New York, and the young Branstetter joined his father in July of that year. The reunion was short-lived when Brandstetter learned that his father had taken a new wife, much younger than his mother. Instead of returning to Europe, Brandstetter swiftly integrated himself in to the burgeoning immigrant communities of New York, and swiftly took a job in a sweatshop run by a Russian-Jewish family. He worked for six days a week alongside Poles, Slovaks and Hungarians, and also took English lessons to broaden his prospects.

By Christmas of 1928, Brandstetter left the sweatshop and worked for a pharmacy as a cleaner. Through a loose familial connection from Germany who was visiting the USA, Brandstetter managed to secure an apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer, working alongside the likes of the Russian aviator Igor Sikorsky. After the Sikorsky Manufacturing Company was purchased by a larger company, Brandstetter sought employment elsewhere, and began his career as a lifelong hotelier. He worked for the Paradise Show Boat in Troy, the Laurel in the Pines in Lakewood, the Carlyle Hotel, the St. Moritz Hotel and the Roney Plaza in Miami. Whilst at St. Moritz, he took a brief excursion to Montreal, Canada to formally apply for US citizenship at the urging of an FBI agent.

In May of 1939, Brandstetter and his friend William Palmer established the ‘Champlain Corporation’, and took over the lease of the Bluff Point Hotel, near Lake Champlain. They opened it under the new name; the Hotel Champlain. The hotel attracted many high profile guests, in part thanks to the Jewish journalist Walter Winchell writing favorable reviews of the establishment. By the summer of 1940, reservations at the hotel were diminishing thanks to the economic hesitancy that the recent outbreak of war in Europe had wrought. Brandstetter then returned to work at St. Moritz before enlisting in the US Army.

After a brief wait and a legal name change, Brandstetter traveled from Fort Dix to Fort Benning. He took a series of tests that proved his mental aptitude to be above average, and was assigned to the Military Occupation Specialty. He was briefly delisted from active duty and served with the National Guard, but returned following the attack on Pearl Harbor. He attended the OCS, graduating in December of 1942. He applied for parachute training, but was refused due to his age of 30. He spent two months in the maintenance department of a tank school, before being reassigned to the MITC at Camp Ritchie.

He graduated in October of 1943, and was ordered by Charles Y. Banfill to observe war games manoeuvres in Camp Campbell, Tennessee. Before long, he was shipped to the European Theater. Brandstetter was first stationed in England and stayed at the Lygon Arms hotel in the Cotswolds. At the hotel, he met with the British Colonel Victor Jones, who had served in the North Africa campaign. Through this meeting, Brandstetter met Lord Hastings Ismay, who in turn placed Brandstetter on assignment at the London Cage; a high profile prisoner facility in Hyde Park, London. There, his immediate senior was the Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Scotland. In this posting, Brandstetter learned about the British methods of interrogation, some of which included the use of small parachute teams of highly trained IPW’s. With this in mind, Brandstetter requested a meeting with the American General William C. Lee, who was stationed at the 101st HQ at Swindon. He proposed to Lee that the Americans should also have a contingent of IPW parachutists. After some convincing, Lee instructed Brandstetter to join Robert Sink’s 506th Parachute Regiment.

On D-Day, Brandstetter took part in Operation Overlord and landed with his IPW team on the beaches of Normandy. The first two days were somewhat fruitless in terms of the Intelligence gathered, as captured German soldiers were often too injured to respond to questions. By the third day, Brandstetter and his team mates managed to acquire Intelligence regarding the locations of German anti-aircraft guns, which were summarily located and destroyed by the Allies, aiding in the invasion. After eight days in France, Brandstetter returned to England to inform his superiors of his success. They allowed him to return to Normandy with more IPWs, and Brandstetter’s team encountered many Russians in German uniforms fighting on the side of the National Socialists. Brandtetter’s team returned to England once more, with captured soldiers.

One German officer of a higher rank had a flask containing Brandy that he had kept on his person since serving on the Russian front in 1942. He gave his flask to Brandstetter, citing that the war was over for him. Brandstetter kept the flask on his person, sharing it with many often, which earned him the nickname ‘Brandy’; a moniker that would follow him for the rest of his life.

On the 1st of July, 1944 Brandstetter was promoted to the rank of Captain. On the 1st of September, he visited the G-2 Intelligence offices of the XVIII corps headquarters. He learned that Robert Sink had highly recommended him, and that he was to be placed as the assistant to Colonel Whitfield Jack. They soon got to work on planning Operation Market Garden. On the 17th of September, Brandstetter and his men were preparing to join the offensive. One of the newly assigned IPWs was uncomfortable, as he had never made a jump before. Brandstetter assured him that things would go smoothly. They participated in the offensive, landing in Holland with the 506th Division.

Later in the year, Brandstetter returned to England in order to interrogate captured prisoners now held in British camps. On a routine visit to Le Marchant Barracks in Devizes, he learned that ten prisoners had recently escaped, but returned on their own volition the next day. Thanks to his interrogations of German NCO Hermann Storch, Brandstetter was able to uncover a substantial German escape plot that was set to take place on Christmas Eve. He immediately informed Colonel Jack, and the pair took the Intelligence to General Matthew Ridgeway. Ridgeway in turn contacted the British General Kenneth Strong and sent Brandstetter to meet with him.

After delivering his report, Brandstetter returned to the London Cage to inform A. P. Scotland of his findings. Several British POW camps were immediately outfitted with a new set of prisoners, German-speaking Allied moles. They soon found that Storch’s confession held weight, and that the German prisoners were planning a co-ordinated jail-break and counter offensive. Storch then confessed to Brandstetter that the date of the action had been brought forward to the 14th of December. Brandstetter and his fellow officers acted immediately, and airborne divisions were sent to take charge of the prisons and inform the Germans that their plans had been thwarted. The case was later reported by John B. McDermott of the United Press, and carried by the New York Times.

Following the successful suppression action in British prisons, Brandstetter took part in the Battle of the Bulge. He was briefly injured, taking a bayonet to the shoulder. As he made his way into Belgium, Brandstetter and his team discovered the bodies of dead American soldiers at Malmedy, which would later become known as the ‘Malmedy Massacre’. Fellow Ritchie Boy William R. Perl would later be tasked with interrogating the German offenders.

As Brandstetter and his IPW team progressed through the country, they were also on the lookout for potential German infiltrators believed to be working under the direction of Otto Skorzeny. In the case of one captured German Naval officer, Brandstetter and his Jewish sergeant took great offence to the officer’s remarks of “Die stinkenden Amerikanische Juden.”[3] When the German officer then proceeded to spit on an American flag, Brandstetter ordered his sergeant to strip the officer. As the sergeant held the officer at gun point, Brandstetter searched the man’s naked body for any identifying tattoos. At this point, two British Military Intelligence Officers came to observe American IPW tactics. Upon the discovery of the naked German being ‘prodded’ with a bayonet by American soldiers, they elected to leave immediately.

On the 24th of March, 1945 Brandstetter jumped across the Rhine with the US 17th Airborne Division. After a successful push through German towns, in part thanks to Brandstetter’s Intelligence gathering, he and his fellow IPWs were tasked with tracking down leading German industrialists. Travelling with a fellow soldier who was a German Jew, the pair happened upon Villa Hügel in Essen. There, they located the industrialist Baron Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, who was sitting in his office. Brandstetter recalled that his fellow officer attempted to fire at a seated Krupp with his weapon, and that Brandstetter effectively thwarted the assassination attempt. They informed their senior officers at the CIC of Krupp’s location, and he was subsequently captured and later tried for war crimes.

In May of 1945, Brandstetter happened upon the Wöbbelin concentration camp, which was also discovered by fellow Ritchie Boys Werner T. Angress, Manfred Steinfeld, and others. Following V-E Day, Brandstetter drafted a speech to be read at the memorial service for many of the prisoners who had perished at the camp. He then spent his time in post-war Europe as an assistant to General Ridgeway. In September, he accompanied the General on a trip to San Francisco. Whilst there, he met his first wife; Barbara Fisk Peart. They married shortly after meeting, and Brandstetter spent a short amount of time with her before leaving with General Ridgeway on a new assignment in Italy.

Whilst in Caserta, he studied documents at G-2 and discovered a familiar name; Marie Brandstetter. He read the reports which told him that she had been working for the underground resistance in Vienna, and that she had also been captured and tortured by German officers. Brandstetter was given permission to leave to search for her, and swiftly traveled through Europe to find his little sister. In Bratislava, he located both his little sister and his mother who were in poor health. He arranged for the care of both women, and also met his new stepfather; a soldier by the name of Emil Pratt who had fought for the Allied side.

On New Year’s Day of 1946, Brandstetter accompanied General Ridgeway to the United Nations Delegation in London. Ridgeway served as Eisenhower’s representative of the US Military Committee, and the conference included many highly placed officials and civilians, including but not limited to; John Foster Dulles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Ralph Bunche, Senators Tom Connaly and Arthur Vandenberg, and Major General William F. Dean. Shortly after the conference, Brandstetter learned that his new wife had become ill with schizophrenia.

He promptly traveled back to the USA, carrying with him Top Secret documents which he delivered to the Military Police detachment in Washington. He went for lunch with a friend; Dr. Eugene Hegy in New York City and collapsed at the table. It was fortuitous for Brandstetter that he was with a doctor when he lost consciousness, and he was swiftly sent to the Army Hospital at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. He was soon transferred to the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington DC on the 20th of February. He was diagnosed with ‘Anxiety State, acute, mild’, and spent two months recovering in the hospital. Following his recovery, he worked alongside General Ridgeway for a short while, before being relieved of his assignment in June.

Brandstetter took some time to speak with Colonel Shipley Thomas, who had been working for G-2 Intelligence during the war. Brandstetter had been inspired by British efforts to keep track of all of their Military Intelligence personnel, and he wished to implement a similar system in America. The pair approached the former Camp Ritchie commander Charles Y. Banfill, who endorsed the idea. Banfill then made recommendations to the Pentagon regarding the project. They took the project to Colonel Carter W. Clarke, who had assisted Banfill at Camp Ritchie. Clarke had a deep history within American Military Intelligence, and headed a War Department investigation into what American Intelligence knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor. More notably, he was the founder of the Venona Project; which he built initially to spy on Russian relations with Germany.

Following the war, the project would demonstrate a wider Communist network in the USA and elsewhere. Brandstetter worked with the men to collect the names of roughly 2000 graduates of Camp Ritchie, out of which the organization ‘Former Graduates of Camp Ritchie’ was formed. They sent letters to every name on their list, and began building a network of information-sharing between members. This organization would, over the years, expand to include members from the FBI, NSA, CIA and other agencies. It became what is now known as the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), which was incorporated in 1975 by the CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, who was also a long-time friend of Brandstetter.

On the 4th of September of 1946, Brandstetter requested release from active duty. Whilst his request was processing, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel before being released on the 22nd of April, 1947. He returned to the hotel industry, and worked as the Assistant Manager of the Santa Barbara Biltmore in California. During the Berlin Blockade of 1948, Brandstetter contacted Colonel Clarke volunteering his services. He was soon stationed at the Presidio, where he worked on matters of Military Intelligence. When tensions had subsided in Germany, he returned to civilian work and took a post managing the Orinda Country Club in California.

In 1951, Brandstetter and his wife moved to Dallas, where he took a management position with Continental Restaurants. During the mid-1950’s, he partnered once more with William Palmer on a hotel venture, this time in Jamaica. This eventually folded in February of 1957.

Brandstetter then sent his resume to Hilton International, who were in the process of vastly expanding their hotel chains. After some training at the Walforf Astoria, he was transferred to the Havana Hilton in Cuba. Due to the political tensions and lack of business in 1958, Brandstetter laid off half of the staff, which did not please the Batista government. As such, Brandstetter was kidnapped by police and made to meet with Esteban Ventura. He was warned against his activities, but due to the economic decline more staff were later laid off. This warranted a second visit, which was followed by promotions to Americans to draw in clientele to increase revenue.

In the fall of 1958, Brandstetter took two weeks to complete his compulsory active military service. He also took the time to notify his superiors about the political changed on the ground. Upon his return to Cuba, he noticed frequent violence in the streets and many businesses suffering from electricity problems. His hotel’s chief engineer, Manuel Ray Rivero managed to keep the hotel’s amenities working throughout the tumultuous period. Brandstetter suspected that his chief engineer knew more than he was saying about the events, and quizzed him on several occasions. Rivero remained ambiguous, and Brandstetter prepared for potential violence at the hotel should Fidel Castro come to power. He sent word through private channels to Camilo Cienfuegos and Castro, that should he require the Hilton as a base for his men, it would be on offer. On New Year’s Eve, he received a brief phone call from the Chicago Tribune correspondent Jules DuBois, who simply sold him “Tonight’s the night.”[4]

On New Year’s Day of 1959, Castro staged his revolution in Cuba. Some of his troops attempted to take over Brandstetter’s hotel, but were negotiated down from their hostilities. Brandstetter offered the hotel as a base for the revolutionaries, an offer they initially refused. Just over a week later, Castro moved in with his troops and used the Havana Hilton as his temporary base. Brandstetter became heavily acquainted with Castro during this period, escorting him throughout the hotel and tasting his food for potential poison. He aided Castro in reaching out to Americans, drafting a press release for him and aiding him with television interviews. Through government channels, an interview was arranged thanks to the Jewish head of NBC David Sarnoff. He recommended that Jack Paar conduct an interview with Castro on The Tonight Show. Brandstetter formulated the interview, in part using his POW techniques he learned at Camp Ritchie to make Castro appear sympathetic to American audiences. The questions were cleared with Castro and the interview aired on the 2nd of February, 1959. During the revolution, Brandstetter’s chief engineer Rivero had disappeared. He soon re-appeared as the Minister of Public Works in Castro’s government.

On the 15th of February, 1959 Brandstetter was summoned back to the USA to complete his mandatory annual two week service. He never returned to Havana, and reported on the political situation to his senior, Colonel Robert C. Roth. On the 1st of July, 1959 Brandstetter accepted a position as the resident manager of the Las Brisas resort in Acapulco, Mexico.

He spent the majority of his working life at the resort, acting in part as a hotelier, but also as a Military Intelligence officer. One of his first major contacts was the French Intelligence agent Phillipe de Vosjoli, who had been staying at the Hilton in Havana during the revolution. The two had not met in Cuba, but formed a working relationship.

During this time, Brandstetter expanded his Intelligence network by hosting high profile guests and military men. One of the British Naval Officers he received was Prince Charles of Wales. The Prince visited with Brandstetter in his office, and took great interest in the New York Times article regarding Brandstetter’s suppression of the potential German rebellion in British prisons in December of 1944. The Prince asked for further documentation, and obliged by later sending a sealed envelope of evidence through channels to the British Monarchy.

In December of 1962 and May of 1963, Brandstetter noticed a questionable guest at his resort. On the first occasion, he noticed that the guest was dressed oddly and had far more money in cash than most would need for a vacation. Through his Intelligence channels, he spoke with his friend Deke DeLoach; deputy associate director of the FBI to enquire about aliases the man might use. The guest, Boyd Frederick Douglas Jr. turned out to be wanted by the FBI. He was swiftly apprehended. The guest in May turned out to be Bobby Eugene Booth, also wanted by the FBI. On both occasions, Brandstetter received a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, thanking him for his efforts.

The Hilton contract on Las Brisas resort ended in 1963. In April of 1964, Brandstetter entered in to a partnership with the Mexican businessman Son Carlos Trouyet. Both were now owners of the hotel. When Lyndon Baines Johnson came to power, both his daughter and brother were frequent guests of the hotel. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson arrived on a trip with nurses, battling his alcoholism.

Brandstetter observed him talking in to a tape recorder by the pool on occasion, at times listing his brother’s weaknesses and other sensitive details. Brandstetter considered that this could potentially threaten National Security, and so struck up afriendship with him. He convinced Sam Johnson to store the tapes in the hotel safe. He then telephoned Lyndon B. Johnson’s security detail to inform them of the tapes. The same evening, he received a call from the President who ordered him to deliver the tapes to him personally in Texas. Brandstetter immediately obliged.

In March of 1972, fellow Ritchie Boy Henry Kissinger visited Mexico for a private visit with President Luis Echeverría Álvarez. He met with Brandstetter as Las Brisas and was surprised to learn that he knew about Kissinger’s upcoming covert meeting. After leaving Mexico, he sent Brandstetter a letter of thanks and mentioned that he was very impressed by the span of his intelligence network. The two would meet at social events on occasion over the years.

In February 1976, an article titled ‘Tip for the Church Committee’ was published in Ritchie Boy Laughlin Phillips’ publication The Washingtonian. It was written to advise Ritchie Boy Frank Church’s committee about clandestine CIA operations overseas, and pointed towards the Hilton Hotel chain as an international corporation used for cover operations. It named Brandstetter, and mentioned that Las Brisas as the favored playspot for personnel of the CIA’s Mexico City Station. The same year, Brandstetter hosted an international Backgammon tournament at the hotel. The inception of the idea came as a way to attract a more international audience, and it was in part aided by a business arrangement with the Jewish Bronfman family, who wished to expand their Seagrams Empire. The endeavor was successful, and Brandstetter acted as the sales manager of Seagrams de Mexico for a year. From 1978-79 he acted as a representative for the Seagrams Overseas Sales Company.

Brandstetter remarried in 1978, this time to the German born socialite Marianne Porzelt. She was a keen backgammon player and were known to play against each- other often. The former Mexican President Miguel Aleman and radio broadcaster Gordon McLendon served as the best men for the occasion. In January of 1981, Bransdtetter attended the Presidential Inauguration Dinner for Ronald Reagan. He was joined by the businessman W. Clement Stone, who he had first met at the 1968 Republican National Convention. In the time since, Stone had become one of Brandtetter’s neighbors in Acapulco. Stone had also been a major donor to the Reagan campaign.

On the 4th of November, 1981 the famed British Actor David Niven arrived at Las Brisas. He was accompanied by Loel Guinness, also a friend and neighbor of Brandstetter’s. Following drinks and dinner, they discussed their wartime activities. They were both surprised to find that they both trained under Colonel Scotland. They were further surprised to find that Niven had been one of the British soldiers who briefly witnessed Brandstetter and another soldier strip and threaten a German.

A similar wartime remembrance occurred in April of 1982, when Brandstetter made the acquaintance of the German born banker Curt Lowell, who told Brandstetter that he had trained at Camp Ritchie. He then recognized Brandstetter as the officer leading the parachute jumps during Operation Market Garden, and that he was the young officer who had never jumped before. He reportedly told Brandstetter “You’re the son-of-a-bitch who nearly got me killed!”[5] They soon became friends.

Over the years, Brandstetter traveled to South Africa, Cyprus, Greece, China, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Argentina and many other countries. Sometimes these werefact finding missions, matters of business or covert operations. In the later years of his life, he was rewarded by the Spanish government for his covert role in quelling tensions during the 1981 attempted coup.

He was the recipient of many awards in Acapulco for his community efforts. He spent 40 years as a reservist, and despite receiving a congratulatory award from the CIA in the later years of his life, he insisted he was never formally employed by the organization.

He passed away on the 11th of November, 2011.

Leo Castelli

Castelli was born Leo Krausz on the 4th of September, 1907 to wealthy Jewish parents in Trieste, Austria-Hungary. His father had married the daughter of affluent coffee importers, and the family resided in Vienna until the end of WWI. When Trieste was annexed by Italy, the family changed their names from Krausz to Castelli.

In his youth, Castelli excelled at languages and soon spoke and read fluently in Italian, Greek, German, French and English, and earned a degree from the University of Milan in 1924. His father then secured him a job at an insurance company, and moved to work insurance in Bucharest where he met and married Ileana Schapira; the Jewish daughter of Mihail Schapira who had been the financial advisor to King Carol II of Romania. Castelli honeymooned with his wife in Vienna, where the couple bought their first piece of artwork; a Matisse watercolor.

In 1937, Castelli and his wife moved to Paris with the help of his father in law who secured him a job at the Banca d'Italia, and the couple ingratiated themselves with members of high society. They also established relationships with both well- recognized and up and coming artists such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. René Drouin, a French interior designer and Castelli worked together to open a gallery on the Place Vendome in 1939, specializing in surrealistic art with pieces from Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim and Eugène Berman, amongst others.

At the outbreak of WWII, Castelli and his wife made plans to leave Europe, and with the help of her connections the couple managed to immigrate, journeying via Marrakesh, Tangier, Algeciras, Vigo and Havana. His parents were not able to make the trip, and allegedly died at the hands of the Hungarian Arrow Cross party.

Upon arriving in America in 1941, Castelli took graduate history courses in economic history at Columbia University, until volunteering for the US Army in 1942.

He was trained at Camp Ritchie, and was shipped to the European Theatre where he served as an interpreter in Bucharest for the Allied Control Commission. During his time on military leave, he visited Paris and stopped by the Place Vendôme gallery where his former business partner Drouin had set up business selling work by European avant-garde artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier.

Castelli returned to New York in 1946, and took a managerial position in his father in law’s clothing factory and befriended Clement Greenberg; the Jewish essayist and art critic who was writing for The Nation. Greenberg introduced Castelli to the burgeoning scene of surrealist and abstract artists in New York. Greenberg would later join the American Committee for Cultural Freedom; the US affiliate of the CIA backed Congress for Cultural Freedom which was headed by Ritchie Boy Michael Josselson. The ACCF was headed by the Jewish philosopher Sidney Hook; a Marxist turned avowed anti-Communist. Greenberg also aided Castelli in his introduction to the new wave of Pop artists and minimalists.

In 1947, Drouin furnished Castelli with roughly a hundred canvases by Wassily Kandinsky, marking Castelli’s first venture in to professional art dealing. He became friends with the art dealer Sidney Janis, who opened his own gallery in 1948 and invited Castelli to curate a show at his gallery in 1950. The following year, Castelli staged an art exhibition still lauded today by those in the art world as the ‘coming out’ party of a new wave of modern American artists; the 9th Street Art Exhibition of 1951.

In 1968, he acquired an industrial loft in Harlem which became known as the Castelli Warehouse. The 1970’s saw Castelli expanding his range of artists into that of performance artists, aiding in the launches and bolstering the careers of people such as Joan Jonas, Poppy Johnson, Richard Landry, and Philip Glass.

In 1971, as part of an art collective of dealers known as the Hague Art Collective, Castelli and others acquired a building at 420 West Broadway in New York. By this time Castelli had divorced his wife Ileana, who had remarried Michael Sonnabend, and the two had been introducing modern art, especially Pop art to Europe. They returned to New York to open a gallery on the second floor of 420 West Broadway.

In the 1980’s, Castelli opened a second exhibition space in Greene Street. He was known for pioneering a ‘stipend system’; paying artists a monthly allowance in order to produce materials, whether they were to be sold or not. Many of the artists Castelli worked with received acclaim from their fellow travellers in the art world, including names such as; Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Lee Bontecou, James Rosenquist, Ronald Davis, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard Serra, and many more.

Castelli was a recipient of the rosette of the French Legion of Honor for donating works to the Centre Pompodou. The mayor of Trieste made him the honorary director of the Revoltella Museum. In 1998, the National Arts Club awarded him its Centennial Medal of Honor. On this occasion, actor Dennis Hopper called Castelli “the godfather of the contemporary art world.”[6]

His space in Greene Street closed in 1997, and Castelli passed away two years later on the 21^st of August, 1999. Upon his death, artist James Rosenquist (who had sold works to Ritchie Boy Fred Howard) wrote his obituary in TIME magazine.

Tom Forkner

Forkner was born on the 14th of June, 1918 in Hawkinsville, Georgia and would go on to develop one of America’s most well-known franchises; Waffle House. In his youth, Forkner attended Young Harris Junior College and the Woodrow Wilson College of Law, where he earned a law degree.

He practiced law until he was drafted in to the US Army. He spent time in the OCS and then the CIC as an Intelligence agent, after which he was stationed at Camp Ritchie.

Of his training at the camp, he recalled that it was incredibly rigorous. He was then sent to Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Engineer District headquarters in New York. At Oak Ridge he was tasked with transporting valuable assets from Tennessee to Los Alamos.

Whilst working as a security officer in New York, he recalled the officers had also acquired shipments of what he thought was the finest wine he had ever seen. In exchange for allowing the officers to keep the wine they had taken from Europe, they furnished him with a case. He also recalled that General Leslie Groves was also requested some of the wine, which Forkner delivered to him.

After the war Forkner returned to Georgia and worked for his family’s real estate company. In 1949 he sold a home to the man with whom he would become a long time business partner; Joseph Wilson Rogers, who had also served in the war and had been managing chain restaurants ever since. On Labor Day weekend of 1955, Forkner and Rogers opened the first Waffle House, being the second restaurant in the region to open 24 hours a day. The venture proved successful and by 1960, the pair had opened their fourth restaurant and quit their former respective jobs.

In 1959, Forkner suffered from ill health due to the amount of work, and after suffering many ailments began to play golf as part of his health plan. Forkner became an accomplished golfer and won many awards; he was named Georgia Senior Champion four times, Georgia Seniors Four-Ball Champion twice and International Senior Champion twice.

Over the years, Waffle House developed into one of the largest restaurant franchises in the USA, and a cultural staple. In the 1980’s, the company began a record label; Waffle Records which features music on the jukeboxes in their establishments featuring songs titled There are Raisins in my Toast and Over Easy.

Following the Joplin tornado in 2011, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate established ‘The Waffle House Index’, which measures the severity of a natural disaster in correlation to the status of the Waffle Houses in the area, owing to their resilience for having two restaurants remain open during Joplin. The index is comprised of three tiers; Green – Indicating that a full menu is served and all systems are functional; Yellow – Indicating minor damage and a limited menu; Red – The restaurant is closed indicating severe damage to the area. During the Covid-19 Flu response in April of 2020, the index was reported Red due to 99% of the establishments being forced to close.

From the 1970’s Forkner had taken a somewhat limited role in the business due to his health, but still remained active in company affairs and was said to have been in the office daily as late as 2007. As of 2017, there are 2,100 branches of Waffle House.

Forkner was inducted into the Georgia Hall of Fame in 2007. He passed away on the 26th of April, 2017.

George W. F. Hallgarten

George Wolfgang Felix Hallgarten was born on the 3rd of January, 1901 to parents of partial Jewish ancestry in Munich, Germany. His Jewish great-grandfather, Lazarus Hallgarten had founded the banking house L. Hallgarten & Co. in New York in the mid 1800’s. His grandfather, Charles L. Hallgarten returned to Germany and continued to work in banking and was heavily invested in philanthropic endeavors.

His father, Robert Hallgarten was a scholar and his Lutheran mother; Constanze Wolff Hallgarten was head of the Munich based group ‘International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom’ and was also active in the League of Nations. The family was close with Thomas Mann’s family, who not only mirrored the Hallgarten’s with partial Jewish ancestry but would also have a son become a Ritchie Boy (Klaus Mann).

George Hallgarten was raised Protestant and attended the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich alongside Heinrich Himmler, who was a childhood friend of Hallgarten. This would later be written about by Hallgarten in a response to fellow Ritchie Boy Werner T. Angress and his co-author Bradley F. Smith who had commented on Himmler’s youth in their 1959 article Diaries of Heinrich Himmler's Early Years in the Journal of Modern History. The article offered examples from Himmler’s early writings that might point towards his political beliefs later in life, and the article would serve as the beginnings for a book penned by Smith; Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making, 1900-1926 (1971). Hallgarten promptly offered a rebuttal in a Letter to the Editor shortly following the article’s release. In his response, Hallgarten offered a defense of Himmler and said that during their friendship, “he was competitively free of anti-Semitism”[7] and instead offered arguments as to why Himmler’s later motivations were more political than ethnic.

In his youth, Hallgarten attended the University of Munich and studied with the historians Erich Marcks and Alexander von Mueller. He attended the lectures of Max Weber at Heidelberg and wrote his dissertation on German-Polish relations prior to 1848 under Herman Oncken.

In 1933, he moved from Germany to France and from 1935-36 he was a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études Sociales et Internationales in Paris. During his time in France, Hallgarten published excerpts of his work Vorkriegsimperialismus (Pre-War Imperialism) which would then be circulated by exiled members of the Frankfurt School in the USA, in addition to academics at The New School.

In 1937, he immigrated to the USA where he began to lecture at Brooklyn College before taking a position as a research assistant at the Hoover Institution in 1939, and then another research position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1940.

In 1942 he joined the US Army and was trained at Camp Ritchie. He was then sent to the European Theater where he served with the 3rd Mobile Radio Broadcast Company.

Following the war, Hallgarten served as a historian and senior research assistant for the War Department. In 1947 he served on a team of the War Crimes branch studying the Nuremberg Military Tribunals materials and remarked that the documents “exceed everything a poor devil such as I could ever offer.”[8]

In 1949 he served briefly as a visiting professor at the University of Munich, and then returned to the USA and continued his career in academia with a focus on European history and the nature of dictatorships. From 1955-56, Hallgarten worked for the American Historical Association’s War Documents Committee, microfilming captured German war documents, which was later stored at the National Archives.

In 1956 he embarked on a lecture tour which was sponsored by the University of Minnesota. From 1958-59, Hallgarten conducted a lecture tour of the Federal German Republic and would later lecture overseas in India and Japan (1965) and Rome and Munich (1967).

In the USA he served as visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (1968-69), the University of Dayton (1970-71) and as the Robert E. Lee Bailey Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte (1971-72).

He was the author of several books including Why Dictators (1954), Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie (1955), an autobiography titled Als die Schatten fielen (1969) and Deutsche Industrie und Politik: Von Bismark bis heute (1974) with co-author Joachim Radkau. He was fluent in German, English and French and lectured internationally.

He passed away on the 22nd of March, 1975.

Horace W. Schmahl

Horst William Schmahl was born in Dusseldorf, Germany on the 28th of June, 1908 and would go on to become one of the most mysterious double agents on public record. His grandfather was from Massachusetts and founded a law firm that dealt in ‘black ivory’ slaves, and later fought as a confederate naval officer. The family then moved to Germany, where his father fought in the Kaiser’s navy in WWI.

After studying Law in European Universities including the Sorbonne, he moved to the USA in 1929 where he worked as a translator of legal documents and patents in New York. Schmahl then formed a law firm with his sister Ruth, called Schmahl and Schmahl. He also served for a time as a deputy sheriff in Nassau County.

In the 1930’s, he was employed by John G. Broady; a private eye who had previously been convicted for bugging New York City Hall. Broady claimed that Schmahl had visited Germany after Adolf Hitler was in power and ingratiated himself with Hitler’s photographer, duplicated keys to his darkroom and filing cabinets, and proceeded to steal many prints of the leader that he would later sell in the USA.

Schmahl worked on the Druckman investigation with Broady, and during the 1930’s he was allegedly a double agent infiltrating pro-German movements in the USA, such as ‘The Friends of New Germany” headed by figures such as Heinz Spanknöbel and Fritz Julius Kuhn, and heavily opposed by figures such as Samuel Untermeyer; the prominent Zionist lawyer who had helped to prepare the Federal Reserve Act and co-founded the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League in 1933.

Schmahl worked the German-American Bund Case at the Naturalization Control Unit. He claimed to have had at least 4000 Germans deported. Spanknöbel was later arrested in Dresden in 1945 and was held in the NKVD Special Camp No. 1 near Mühlberg, Brandenburg where he died of starvation in 1947.

Schmahl worked with William Donovan’s law firm prior to 1941. An MID report claimed that at one point he had worked for the Zurich Insurance Company and that part of his work was for Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the American Jewish Congress, assisting them with translation work.

During WWII, Schmahl enlisted in the US Army joined the effort on behalf of the OSS due to his relationship with Donovan. He remarked years later; “The OSS knew no rules. We did what had to be done - killing, bombing, whatever. If the OSS were alive today, Mr. Khadafy would not be.” [9]

Schmahl also claimed that he helped to prevent Allied bombing of the Cologne cathedral, and kept a glass engraving of the cathedral in his office later in life. In the same office he also displayed what was claimed to have been a dagger owned by the German U-Boat commander; Admiral Karl Dönitz.

In 1944-45 he trained at Camp Ritchie, after which he was transferred to an Intelligence unit at Camp Lee. During this time he was investigated. Files assembled on him asserted that whilst he had worked for the Lawyers and Merchants Translation Bureau he violated his employment contract and solicited their business for his own American Translation Bureau. Schmahl was passed up for some future government work following the war. He also maintained a working relationship with the FBI.

Following the war, Schmahl resumed working as a PI, and during the late 1940’s became a key figure in the infamous Alger Hiss case; the government official who had worked on FDR’s New Deal and was the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on International Organization. The case began after Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time Magazine, Soviet Spy and ardent Communist had accused Hiss and others of being Soviet agents during a hearing before the House on Un-American Activities Committee, claiming that Hiss had been a member of the ‘Ware Group’ in the 1930’s. Despite Chambers offering repeatedly contradicting statements in relation to Hiss, for example at first asserting that Hiss was not engaged in espionage, and then reversing his position and asserting that he was, Hiss protested his innocence and opted to appear in front of HUAC to clear his name. At HUAC, Chambers and Hiss exchanged dialogue where Chambers repeatedly made contradicting statements, and when Hiss asked if he could reconcile this duplicity, Chambers responded; “Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.”[10] After the hearing, Chambers continued to make accusations against Hiss, alleging that not only was Hiss a Communist but also a spy, at which point Hiss filed a Libel suit against him.

Schmahl was employed as part of the Hiss defence team, and Chambers as part of his defense, produced a series of documents known today as ‘The Pumpkin Papers’, named so because they had at one point been stored in a pumpkin. Chambers alleged that the documents were official government documents that had been retyped on the Hiss family typewriter, and handed to him by Hiss as part of his espionage duties. Hiss denied the accusations and was no longer in possession of the typewriter that had been alleged to be used.

Schmahl was tasked with locating the typewriter, and even though many other FBI agents were looking for the same device, he was the one to procure it following a long string of hearsay as to its location. In the run up to the perjury case, Hiss had met Schmahl and did not take a liking to him. It would be years later that he learned Schmahl had been a double agent. During the trial, Schmahl was in contact with the FBI, and left the defence team of Hiss after he presented the typewriter.

FBI documents later revealed that Schmahl had been instructed by the FBI to penetrate the Hiss defence team. More questions were raised in the wake of the ordeal in regards to Schmahl’s dealing with the German-American Bund, and its leader Adam Kunze, who was reportedly an expert on typewriters, but by the time these revelations came out Kunze had died. Hiss was later charged with perjury, the typewriter being one of the key pieces of evidence, and he served 44 months in prison. He spent the rest of his life trying to exonerate himself.

In August and October of 1973, Schmahl was interviewed by a man named Mr. Lockwood in Fort Lauderdale, where Schmahl was operating a marine engineering and surveying business. In the interviews, he claimed that he had been hired by the New York law firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine in 1946-7 to help in producing a forged typewriter. Schmahl stated that “It was his understanding that it was an experiment designed to determine if such a project were feasible.” 641 He was vague about the exact details, and claimed it was around the same time that that he had Whittaker Chambers’ farm under surveillance, and witnessed many government cars coming and going.

Long-time researcher of the Alger Hiss case; Stephen W. Salant echoed these findings with what he found in relation to Schmahl’s Military Intelligence training; “It turns out that their training at Camp Ritchie included lectures about forgery techniques, tracing documents to typewriters, etc. Military Intelligence had vast experience with forgeries during the war since it had to create bogus documentation to support the cover stories of agents behind enemy lines. Reportedly, Military Intelligence “could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth.” My contribution in this research is to show that someone from this very organization, Military Intelligence, was involved surreptitiously in the Hiss case and to point out to students of Cold War espionage cases that the Corps’s activities on the home front merit their attention.” [11]

Typewriter forgeries were most notably used during and after WWII, a prominent example being when the British Intelligence Service working out of New York fabricated a communication by the Brazilian head of the Italian airline ‘Linee Aeree Transcontinental Italiane’. The communicate made disparaging remarks about the Brazilian government, and the forgeries were circulated all the way up to President Getulio Vargas, who broke relations with the Axis Powers weeks later in 1940 after having maintained a good relationship with them until that point.

During the Hiss case, Schmahl and his involvement were not well reported on until years after the case, but the case did serve as a springboard for the careers of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. Hiss maintained his innocence throughout his life and fought until the end of it to prove as much.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hiss wrote to several Russian government officials asking them to assist him in this endeavor. His longtime friend and biographer, John Lowenthal, met with General Dmitri A. Volkogonov in Russia, who arranged for Yevgeny Primakov; the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Agency, to search KGB archives. The month after which, Volkogonov responded that the claims of Hiss as a Soviet Spy were “completely groundless”, [12] and that “You can tell Alger Hiss that the heavy weight should be lifted from his heart.”[13]

Hiss then told the New York Times ; “It's what I've been fighting for 44 years... I  think this is a final verdict on the thing. I can't imagine a more authoritative source than the files of the old Soviet Union.” [14] Hiss also took the time to talk to the Washington Post , and claimed that J. Edgar Hoover, who had been head of the FBI at the time, had used the case to act with malice and ‘please various people who were engineering the Cold War’.

Many historians still believe that Hiss was guilty, and write to that effect. The general consensus on whether or not Hiss was guilty is almost as divided today as it was when the case was being tried in 1950. Hiss had been disbarred following his conviction, but after the 1975 release of the ‘Pumpkin Papers’, he was readmitted.

Schmahl continued with his PI work and other government activities over the years. In 1956 his name circulated in relation to the disappearance of Jesús Galíndez; the Basque nationalist writer who was an opponent of the Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo. Schmahl had been for a time involved with the pilot who flew Galíndez from New York to the Dominican Republic; Gerald Lester Murphy, who was later found murdered in 1957. Murphy’s co-pilot, Octavio Antonio de la Meza, was soon found hanging in a jail cell in Ciudad Trujillo.

Part of the investigation led to Schmahl, which in turn resulted in the name Robert Maheu; a businessman who worked in tandem with the FBI, the CIA and Howard Hughes. Maheu would later appear as part of Ritchie Boy Frank Church’s Committee to confirm his role in an assassination plot directed at Fidel Castro.

Following the Galíndez case, Schmahl was indicted for planting a bug in the car of the British monarch; the Duchess of Argyll from the period of December the 22nd, 1960 to the 26th of January, 1961. He received a suspended sentence for the crime.

He passed away in June of 1987.

Lorenzo Semple Jr.

Lorenzo Elliott Semple III was born on the 27th of March, 1923 in New Rochelle, New York. His father worked for a public utility company, and wished to become a playwright. Semple Jr.’s uncle, Philip Barry was already writing for stage and screen, and is most known today as the writer of The Philadelphia Story. Semple Jr. attended the private Brooks School in Massachusetts, which he regarded as a very fine school. The mother of one of his classmates was the writer Ursula Parrott, who encouraged him to write.

Semple Jr. then studied at Yale University, but suspended his studies in his Sophomore year following the outbreak of WWII. He enlisted in the American Field Service, and was then dispatched to North Africa where he worked as an ambulance driver for the Free French and the Foreign Legion. On the 10th of June 1942, he was part of a team engaging in the Battle of Bir Hakiem in Libya. He rescued some of his French counterparts but was injured in his leg thanks to shrapnel in the process. They were subsequently rescued and Semple Jr. received the Medaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre for his efforts, at the age of 19.

He then returned to the USA, and claimed he was “eager to get into the fray”. [15] He got his wish and was drafted soon after his return. Thanks to his French language skills, he was set to Camp Ritchie for training and was made part of Army Intelligence. He was shipped to the European Theater and tasked with writing reports after interrogating French locals and soldiers to find out what was happening behind enemy lines. Reflecting on his work, Semple Jr. recalled; “The reports were totally fictitious, I might say, totally fictitious that I wrote, I wrote very good reports. Our chief thing was to do no harm like a doctor, we didn’t want anyone bombed or shot because of our reports.”[16] During this time he also wrote a story about Military Intelligence which was printed by TIME Magazine.

Following the war, Semple Jr. began to write short stories for Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. In the mid-later 1950’s, he produced two shows for Broadway; The Golden Fleecing and Tonight in Samarkand, but neither achieved success on the stage. The Golden Fleecing was purchased by MGM for $100,000 and re-titled The Honeymoon Machine, which was released in 1961. Semple Jr. later remarked that it was “The only Steve McQueen film that ever lost money.”[17]

In 1958, Semple Jr. began writing for television shows. He wrote the first episode of the show The Rat Patrol, in which he drew from his wartime experiences in Libya. Other writing credits included Burke’s Law and The Rogues. His work in television eventually led him to be approached by the producer William Dozer, who proposed that Semple Jr. write a live-action show for the popular comic series Batman.

Batman was the brainchild of Jewish writers Bob Kane (Robert Kahn) and Bill Finger, writing for what is known today as DC Comics, owned by the Jewish businessmen Jack Liebowitz and Harry Donenfeld. Also under the DC banner was Superman (Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster), Robin and The Joker (Jerry Robinson). The show incorporated visuals from the comics, including vibrant displays of the words “POW!”, “ZAP!” and “WHAM!.” It ran from 1966-68, and has since become a cult classic.

Conversely, Marvel Comics was also spearheaded by Jewish writers, artists and businessmen. Martin Goodman founded Timely Comics, which later became ‘Marvel’. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were responsible for fictitious heroes such as Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor and Black Panther. Thanks to shows such as Semple Jr.’s Batman, Adventures of Superman (1952-58) and Wonder Woman (1975-79), the groundwork was paved for much of the live action superhero genre which dominates the current culture.

Following his work on Batman, Semple Jr. worked on films in the late 1960’s onwards. His works included Pretty Poison (1968), Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971), Papillion (1973), The Parralax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). In 1976, Semple Jr. wrote the screenplay for King Kong, resulting in the film starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. In 1980, he wrote the screenplay for the popular cult film Flash Gordon.

During the 1980’s, he taught screenwriting at New York University. In 2008 he teamed up with his friend Marcia Nasatir (Marcia Birenberg) to review films on YouTube in their show titled Reel Geezers.

Semple Jr.’s daughter, Maria Semple became an accomplished novelist and screenwriter. Her 2012 book Where’d You Go, Bernadette was turned into a film in 2019 by director Richard Linklater, and starred Cate Blanchett. Maria’s husband, George Meyer grew up as a fan of Semple Jr.’s Batman, and in his youth produced a short-lived humor zine titled Army Man. The publication drew the attention of the Jewish ‘Simpsons’ producer Sam Simon, who offered Meyer a position on The Simpsons writing staff. Meyer eventually took the position, and many writers from his Army Man zine, including Tom Gammill, David Sacks and Billy Kimball also joined the writing staff of The Simpsons.

Semple Jr. passed away on the 28th of March 2014.

John Weitz

Weitz was born Hans Herner Weitz on May 25th, 1923 to wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. His parents were very active in the Berlin Social Scene of the Weimar Republic; opening their home for soirées with the likes of Marlene Deitrich and Christopher Isherwood.

As a child, Weitz attended The Hall School; a boarding school in England. From there  he studied at St. Paul’s School until 1939, and after graduation he was named Vice-President of the Old Pauline Club of London. He attended Oxford University for a year, after which he worked as an apprentice to the fashion designer Edward Molyneux, under the suggestion of fellow St. Paul’s classmate John Cavanaugh.

By 1938 the Weitz family had left Germany to live in Paris, after which they had travelled through Yokahoma in Japan and then Shanghai, China alongside many Jews had waiting for US Visas. Whilst at Shanghai, Weitz played on the Shanghai Rugby team, until the family moved to Seattle, Washington in 1941.

Whilst in the USA, Weitz worked for the Voice of America broadcasting company, until he enlisted in the US Army in 1943. He was trained at Camp Ritchie and transferred to the OSS, where he served as an undercover espionage agent in the European Theatre on missions that he described as sensitive work. One of those missions included working with German opposition movements, including those who plotted the assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944 as part of what is now known as ‘Operation Valkyrie’.

After his espionage activities, he and fellow Ritchie Boys Hans Meyerhoff and Hugh Nibley were present for the Allied capture of Dachau prison camp.

Following the war, Weitz went to work at the women’s lingerie department of his father’s retail chain. At the time he was married to Sally Blauner Gold, and with the help of his wife’s parents he managed to establish ‘John Weitz Juniors, Inc.’ which specialized in women’s’ dresses and sportswear. When that business folded, his next venture was ‘John Weitz Designs’ from 1954, during which time he found a mentor in who was at the time a leader in the fashion industry; Dorothy Shaver. In that same year, the CIA-funded LIFE Magazine highlighted Weitz’s works then his career as a fashion designer really took off. He shifted to menswear in 1964, and was one of the forerunners in licensing ‘own name brands’, leading many designers to follow suit. Thanks to these efforts, he soon became a household name.

Aside from his endeavors in the clothing industry, Weitz became a writer after being encouraged by his neighbor John Steinbeck. His early novels were a success and promoted his opulent lifestyle, including The Value of Nothing: A Novel (1970) Man in Charge; The Executive's Guide to Grooming, Manners, and Travel (1974), and Friends in High Places (1982) about the Third Reich. Later his writings moved to studying the National Socialist German government more in depth, with works such as Hitler's Diplomat The Life and Times of Joachim Von Ribbentrop (1992) and Hitler's Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1997). He had claimed that writing about Hitler’s Germany was less of an obsession and more of a duty.

In 1964 Weitz met and married the actress Susan Kohner, daughter of the well-known talent agent Paul Kohner. Paul Kohner was a Czech-born Jewish American immigrant who took care of well-known names such as Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, John Huston, Liv Ullmann and Billy Wilder. He was also one of the founders of the ‘European Film Fund’ in 1938, which assisted many émigrés from Europe to move to America, and mostly to Los Angeles and the Pacific Palisades region. His brother, Ritchie Boy Walter Kohner was also a Hollywood agent whose wife, Hanna Kohner was the first person to talk about the Holocaust on American television.

Paul Kohner had also met with actor Christoph Waltz in later years, and told him to never take ‘Nazi Roles’, otherwise he would be typecast forever. Waltz ended up taking one for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds; a movie about a ‘fictional group of Jewish soldiers who commit violent acts of retribution against the Nazis’. Whilst working on the movie, Tarantino was able to get help from Waltz’s son on Yiddish words, as he is a rabbi living in Israel. Kohner’s advice evidently fell on deaf ears, as Waltz did not suffer in his career for his work and won an Oscar for his portrayal of a fictional SS-Standartenführer.

In later years, Weitz focused more on his writing and over time revealed some personal secrets. He confirmed that thanks to his connections to a former boss in the OSS, that he had seen the infamous gangster blackmail photos of long-serving first director of the FBI; J. Edgar Hoover with his lover; Clyde Tolson. These materials had allowed the likes of Jewish crime figures such as Meyer Lanksy to act with relative impunity around law enforcement. Weitz indulged in many hobbies including race-car driving and yachting, and became a member of the US Naval Academy Sailing Squadron. With Susan Kohner he had two children, Hollywood directors Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, who have worked on films such as American Pie, The Golden Compass, The Twilight Saga; A New Moon and About a Boy.

Over the course of his life he received many awards, including the Sports Illustrated award, a Moscow Diploma, a Brilliant Pen Award (MFI), a Cartier Award for Design Excellence, a Mayor's Liberty Award, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and others.

He passed away on October 3rd, 2002.

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11. ‘Framing a Guilty Man?’ Jeff Kisseloff talking with Stephen W. Salant. Access;

HTTPS://ALGERHISS.COM/HISTORY/CASE-CLOSED-MAYBE-NOT-21ST-CENTURY/RESEARCH-ADVANCES/FRAMING-A-GUILTY-MAN/

12. ‘Russian Says Alger Hiss Was Not Soviet Spy’ John J. Goldman, October 30, 1992. Los Angeles Times.

13. Ibid

14. ‘After 40 Years, a Postscript on Hiss: Russian Official Calls Him Innocent’ October 29, 1992. David Marglolick, NYT.

Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. G. Edward White. 2004. Oxford University Press. p. 214

‘The Typewriters are always the Key’ Fred Cook, October 14, 197. New Times. Access;HTTP://JFK.HOOD.EDU/COLLECTION/WEISBERG%20SUBJECT%20INDEX%20FILES/H%20DISK/HISS%20ALGER/ITEM%2019.PDF

‘Five are Indicted as Axis Spy Ring; Kunze, Former Bund Head, and Vonsiatsky,

Russian Fascist, Are Accused in Hartford’ June 11, 1942. AP.

‘My Lunch With Alger: Oh No, Not Hiss Again!’ Ron Rosenbaum, April 16, 2001.

Observer.

‘The Pumpkin Papers: Key Evidence in the Alger Hiss Trials’ Douglas O. Linder.

Horace W. Schmahl. Arrest Details. Getty. Access; HTTPS://WWW.GETTYIMAGES.CO.UK/DETAIL/NEWS-PHOTO/HORACE-W-SCHMAHL-THE-FORMER-PRIVATE-EYE-ACCUSED-OF-PLANTING-NEWS-PHOTO/457551178

NOTES ON THE ROLES OF ECRACE W. SCHMARL, ADAM KUNZE AND WILLIAM J. DONOVAN IN THE HISS CASE. Access; HTTP://JFK.HOOD.EDU/COLLECTION/WEISBERG%20SUBJECT%20INDEX%20FILES/I%20DISK/IRONS%20PETER%20H/ITEM%2002.PDF

Timeline of Horace Schmahl, Access; HTTPS://QUOD.LIB.UMICH.EDU/H/HISS/

TIMELINE.HTML

FBI Comments on Schmahl, Access;  HTTPS://QUOD.LIB.UMICH.EDU/H/HISS/HISS1111.0147.001/1/—INS-ACCOUNT-OF-SECURITY-INVESTIGATION-PHONE-CALL?PAGE=ROOT;RGN=FULL+TEXT;SIZE=100;VIEW=IMAGE

Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Allen Weinstein, 2013. Hoover Press.

LORENZO SEMPLE JR.

15. Interview. Emmy TV Legends. Television Academy.

16. Ibid

17. ‘Lorenzo Semple Jr., Creator of TV’s ‘Batman,’ Dies at 91’ Mike Barnes, March 28,

2014. The Hollywood Reporter.

‘U.S. HERO IN DESERT HOHORED BY FRENCH; Driver of Field Ambulance, 19,

Gets Medaille Militaire for Bravery Under Fire SAVED FOUR WOUNDED MEN

Lorenzo Semple 3d of Mt. Kisco Who Left Yale for Duty, Injured During Feat’ A.C

Sedgwickwireless, October 10, 1942. NYT.

Obituary. Ronald Bergan, April 2, 2014. The Guardian.

Lorenzo Semple Jr., Creator of TV’s ‘Batman,’ Dies at 91. April 1, 2014, Bruce Weber.

NYT.

‘Lorenzo Semple Jr. dies at 91; successful Hollywood screenwriter in 1970s and ‘80s’

David Colker, March 29, 2014. LA Times.

Obituary. The Herald. April 8, 2014.

JOHN WEITZ

‘John Weitz, 79, Fashion Designer Turned Historian, Dies’ Tina Kelley, October 4,

2002. NYT

‘John Weitz: Stylish fashion designer who lived up to the executive image of his

clothes’ Veronica Horwell, October 12, 2002. The Guardian.

‘John Weitz’ Paula Chin, October 26, 1992. People.

‘Paul Kohner, Hollywood Agent And Film Producer, Is Dead at 85’ Andrew Yarrow,

March 19, 1988.

‘Waltz's Linguistic Magic For 'Basterds'’ August 17, 2009. CBS News.

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