Holocaust Museum Official's Top-Secret World War II Role Profiled

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FARMINGTON HILLS, MI – An official at the Holocaust Memorial Museum whose family spirited him out of out of Nazi Germany to the safety of the United States as a 15-year-old — then later died themselves in the Holocaust — will be featured on Saturday’s episode of “What History Forgot” on the American Heroes Channel.

Gunther “Guy” Stern, the director of the Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, will discuss his work as U.S. Army interrogator during World War II on the program.

Stern lives in West Bloomfield Township with his wife, Susanna Piontek,

The segment of “What History Forgot” that Stern is featured in, airing at 10 p.m., is called “Top Secret World War II.”

Stern, now 94, was one of the “Ritchie Boys,” an intelligence unit of primarily German-speaking refugees from Nazi Germany nicknamed after Camp Ritchie in Maryland, where they were trained.

Stern told The Farmington Observer of his front-lines interrogations as “Kommissar Krukow,” a brutal Russian persona he created, to extract secrets from captured German soldiers. Russian POW camps were brutal even by the Germans’ standards, and “80 percent of the prisoners caved in.”

Stern said that when he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in St. Louis, MO, in 1937, he assumed his parents and two younger siblings, as well as other family members, would join him.

Years passed before he knew they were among the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. He has suffered other losses, too, including his only son and his second, wife, Judy. He lives by a mantra found in Friedrich Schiller’s “William Tell”:

“Look to the future, Werner, not the past.”

In other words, nothing is gained by being downhearted.

“What the hell use is that?” he said. “At this stage in my life, I’ve learned to cope. There are trouble spots — about my family (for example), it still lingers.”

» You can read more about the interview with Guy Stern on Hometownlife.com.

Image credit: YouTube