GUILDERLAND — Jill Franken Dugan, who teaches Spanish at Farnsworth Middle School in Guilderland, recently learned something by chance about her late father’s service in the United States Army.

Her father, Hellmut Frankenberg, was a Ritchie Boy — a graduate of the the Army’s elite military intelligence training program at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The Ritchie Boys, including many Jewish immigrants and refugees like Franken Dugan’s father, were instrumental in helping the Allies win World War II.

A few years after his family fled Nazi Germany and came to America, Hellmut Frankenberg returned to Germany and other parts of Europe, working in intelligence with the U.S. Army. After the war, he changed his name, to Harold Franken.

West Point history professor David Frey told The Enterprise that the Army believes, according to a survey of battalion commanders, that the Ritchie Boys were responsible for gathering at least 60 percent of the actionable intelligence on the Western Front. He estimated that of the 11,000-plus full graduates of Camp Ritchie, about 20 percent identified as Jewish, including many refugees.

Now Franken Dugan and several members of her family are working to gain German citizenship, in tribute to her father and her mother, both German Jews who lost their country and everything they had built to that point.

“The more I look into my genealogy and the older I get, too, I so understand the sacrifices my parents had to go through,” Franken Dugan said. “How atrocious to have your whole identity stripped from you.” 

 

The Ritchie Boys 

The elite intelligence program at Camp Ritchie was set up because the United States lacked the ability to conduct battlefield intelligence, Frey said. The primary goal was to train people to interrogate prisoners of war. Some were trained in aerial reconnaissance, photo analysis, and terrain analysis.

“The select of the select” were assigned to order of battle analysis, Frey said, which involved exhaustive research into all of the Axis armies, including the structure and organization of each unit in the armed forces, who commanded it, what its components were, what its armaments were, and where it had served.

Thanks to this training, if an enemy were captured in the field, the Americans would know — just from the patch on his uniform — what unit he belonged to, what questions to ask, and whether, for instance, tanks would likely be following him. They would be able to inform their superior officers about the capacity of his unit and exploit its weaknesses.

After the Ritchie Boys trained, usually for eight weeks, they were sent, in teams of about six, to work directly with an existing U.S. Army unit. Ritchie Boys served in all the theaters of World War II.

According to his military records, Frankenberg’s training at Camp Ritchie was longer, 18 weeks. Frey said that he may have done extra training, in aerial reconnaissance or order-of-battle analysis.

Franken Dugan’s sister, Debbie Springgate, who lives in Chicago, sent The Enterprise her father’s war records, which list him as having served for three years, from the end of 1942 through the end of 1945, and having the rank of technical sergeant. Scott Springgate explained that graduates of Camp Ritchie were given a rank, often that of sergeant, so that they could execute their duties without any interference from enlisted men.

Debbie Springgate also sent her father’s naturalization letter, which states that he had been naturalized as of May 21, 1943. This was just before he shipped out to begin working overseas, after his training at Camp Ritchie.

Ritchie Boys were made citizens during their training, or as soon as they deployed, Frey said. “We wanted everyone in our Army to become American citizens,” Frey said.

There are legal reasons for that, he said, including that it provides them Geneva protection. If the Germans captured someone they believed was a German citizen, they would summarily execute them for treason. This happened to two Ritchie Boys who were captured during the Battle of the Bulge.

 

 

 

The Silent Generation

Like many members of the so-called Silent Generation, Franken Dugan’s father never spoke much about his military service. When he did talk about it, he would often make a self-deprecating joke. When his family asked why he joined the Army, for instance, he would retort, “Because I was drafted!”

The work done at Camp Ritchie was classified, Frey said, and many who trained there didn’t really talk about it until much later, perhaps half a century later. A documentary on the Ritchie Boys was released in 2004, Frey noted.

It wasn’t until about 2010 that Ritchie Boys really began to identify themselves as a group, he said; until then, they had simply been graduates of a classified training program who had then dispersed around the world.

Franken Dugan’s father began to offer snippets of information about his wartime experiences only in the last few years before his death in 2011. For instance, in about 2008, when several family members were talking about the Tom Cruise movie “Valkyrie,” which depicts the 1944 plot by German army officers to kill Hitler, Franken said he had lived that story.

He explained that, after Hitler’s death in April 1945, he interviewed the medical doctor who had examined the Nazi leader the year before, after a failed assassination attempt. In order to confirm the body was Hitler’s, he was to uncover any injuries Hitler had sustained in that attempt — an explosion — so the Americans could confirm his death.

After avoiding any discussion of his military service for decades, Franken did go into some detail when he and his wife were interviewed by their son-in-law on video in about 2009. He said, for instance, that in London he trained a group of “British naval girls” who were on listening posts and who were daughters of diplomats. He and others trained them in how to gather intelligence from newspapers and from intercepted letters, he said.

He said the Americans had a dossier on about two million Germans. He added, “We knew more about their lives than they did themselves.” Asked how they compiled the information, he said, “Captured documents, relatives, spies, from everything else.”

Franken said that he had gone into German embassies, including in Lisbon and Madrid, after the Nazis had left. He had examined the documents left behind and closed the embassies down. Frey noted that much of this kind of work laid the foundation for historians’ understanding of how various countries responded to Nazi demands.

Debbie Springgate said she was angry that the government made these men keep their accomplishments a secret all this time. She said, “These guys didn’t have a chance to be a hero. Seems like he was ripped off. He couldn’t tell us all the stuff he did. Who wants to hold that back from their children?”

Scott Springgate, Debbie’s husband, said he was elated to find out his father-in-law was a Ritchie Boy.

“We knew what a father he was, what a husband he was, what a friend he was, but we’ve learned so much more about the sacrifice that he endured,” he said. “He came into America and, without deflating other people, he did great for his family, he did great for our national security, and he did great for other people who worked for him. And we’re just learning this, because he never told us.”

 

A new name 

Franken Dugan’s father and the rest of his family all shortened their names to Franken after the war. Hellmut even changed his first name, to Harold.

At first, his children assumed that they did this when they fled to the United States, but they later realized, when they received his war records, which were under the name Hellmut Frankenberg, that he did not change his name until after the war.

Franken Dugan said the family may have done this because the business that her grandfather launched in the United States, which her father joined after the war, involved manufacturing Catholic religious items like prayer cards, bookmarks, and rosary cases.

For a family-run business, it was a huge operation. Their factory would receive orders of, for instance, 100,000 prayer cards at a time. Harold Franken traveled the United States about 200 days a year, as the salesman who visited churches and religious goods stores across the country.

“It may have been that they didn’t think that a Jewish-sounding name would work well,” Franken Dugan laughed.

The company name, Frank Novelty Company, shortened the family name even more.

When history professor Frey was told about the family’s name change, he said, “I think that tells us something about the limits of assimilation at the time, that there still was significant anti-Semitism, and having a recognizably Jewish name was seen by many to be a disadvantage.”

Her father was very progressive for his time, Franken Dugan said. The foreman at Frank Novelty Company was an African American, and most employees were Black or Hispanic. Her father, who eventually took over the company, and his father treated the employees very well, she said. Many stayed with Frank Novelty Company until the factory closed in about 1987.

Said Scott Springgate of the discrimination against African-Americans that was rampant in the 1960s and 1970s, “People of color — that’s an American prejudice, it’s not a world prejudice.” 

 

A chance discovery   

Franken Dugan found out only in January 2022 that her father had been one of the Ritchie Boys. Her sister, Debbie Springgate, had learned about it by chance.

Springgate had a phone call on New Year’s Day from an old friend from childhood, Caryn Ballin, who had lived next door when they were growing up in the town of Ardsley in Westchester County. Ballin’s parents, like Springgate’s, were German Jews who had fled the Nazis.

Ballin told Springgate on the phone, “I never knew my dad was a Ritchie Boy. Do you know what that is?” Springgate said no. For some reason, Ballin said she had to hang up, but would tell her about it another time.

The next night, Springgate was watching sports on TV when she happened to change the channel and land on a “60 Minutes” episode about the Ritchie Boys.

She watched, fascinated. After the program ended, Springgate went online and found a list of the Ritchie Boys who were German Jews. She found the name of her friend’s father, Lucien Ballin, and then kept scrolling down, just in case. After all, the family had always known that her father was in “intelligence” during the war. And there he was: Hellmut J. Frankenberg.

 

“My mission” 

Carly Dugan, Harold Franken’s 26-year-old granddaughter, has been interested in genealogy since she was 15 or 16. She has traced her family back on her father’s side — where the ancestors are Irish, English, and French — to the 1400s.

“My mother’s side is harder,” she said, referring to her German Jewish heritage. “A lot of times there are no records.” She has traced her mother’s side back to the 1800s and is working with relatives she has found on genealogy websites to do more.

“I think it’s really important, especially for young people, to be aware of who came before us,” she said. “It makes you more grateful for the life you have, just knowing about what your grandparents went through, your parents, and then even further, like what your ancestors went through, to get us to this point.”

Dugan went to Israel a few years ago through Birthright, a not-for-profit organization that raises funds for young people around the world to discover their heritage by visiting Israel. She was already 23 when she went, but she decided, like some of the other girls and young women on her trip, to hold a bat mitzvah, or coming-of-age ceremony, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

She explained, “Instead of it being a celebration of becoming an adult, it was celebrating the beginning of really loving my roots.”

Dugan plans to continue to try to piece together more information about her mother’s side of the family.

“That’s my mission,” she said. She added, “It’s actually been very difficult.”

Some of her friends are still fortunate enough to have their grandparents around, she said. She tells her friends to ask them about everything.

“Anything you can ask, it’s not silly,” she said. “Once they’re gone, those stories pass on too.”