This is a book by an Austrian scholar for his fellow Austrians. It is about military resistance against Hitler's tyranny by Austrian exiles serving in the American army. Robert Lackner's work is one of several volumes about the Austrian “Ritchie Boys,” who joined the almost twenty thousand military and civilian personnel trained during World War II at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. He focuses on the 429 soldiers of Austrian origin who specialized in interrogation of German prisoners of war. The book emerged out of a joint 2015 research project with Florian Traussnig concerning Austrian exiles who served in US Army Intelligence after being trained at Camp Ritchie. Sponsored by the Republic of Austria and the Austrian National Bank, the project was under the leadership of Professor Siegfried Beer of the University of Graz, founder of the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda, and Security Studies and editor of the Center's Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (JIPSS), in which Lackner and Traussnig's initial study appeared as “The US Army's Creativity Lab: Camp Ritchie and Its Austrian Trainees in World War II” (JIPSS 9, no. 2 [2015], 7–23). This follow-up study can be seen as a worthy work of Austrian nationalism and redemption.

Readers of Lackner's book will have an advantage over those who only watched “The Ritchie Boys” on Sixty Minutes on ABC on 9 May 2021. They will also get a more scholarly evaluation of the army-trained interrogators than is given by the best-selling American author Bruce Henderson. In his Sons and Soldiers: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned for Retribution (New York, 2017), Henderson presents captivating stories of Jewish soldiers whose original homelands were Nazi Germany and Austria. Lackner, selectively focusing on the Austrian interrogators, presents a more nuanced and evaluative book. His extensive use of archival sources, documented fully in his endnotes and bibliography, include records in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis, Missouri. They give weight to his conclusions regarding the experiences and impact of these American-trained interrogators. He analyzes their military records as well as their memoirs to question and qualify participants’ and chroniclers’ exaggerations of the derring-do and uniqueness of the Ritchie Boys. Nevertheless, he concludes with a positive assessment of their substantial contribution to tactical and strategic American military decision-making in the European theater.

Henderson's Sons and Soldiers, like Christian Bauer and Rebekka Göpfert's Die Ritchie Boys. Deutsche Emigranten beim US-Geheimdienst (Hamburg, 2005), tells thrilling stories. Lackner's more scholarly presentation carefully defines his subject and focuses exclusively on the interrogators of Austrian heritage. His results may be surprising to readers of these earlier books or viewers of Sixty Minutes. Of the 19,600 participants who successfully completed intelligence training at Camp Ritchie only 11,637 were soldiers. The others were civilians. Moreover, according to Lackner's analysis only 494 of the soldiers were Austrians. He notes that the background of the other some eleven thousand soldiers trained at Camp Ritchie has not yet been persuasively determined. A large number of them were certainly German immigrants. Of the Austrians, the largest number were from Vienna and 91 percent were fugitives from the Hitler regime and thus, as Lackner says, “Widerstandskämpfer von aussen” (40). He disputes the view prevalent on the internet and in various popular publications that the Ritchie Boys were an “elite unit primarily composed of German and Austrian Jews” (40). He does admit, however, that according to the Personal History Card data about 62 percent of the Austrian “Ritchie Boys” were Jewish. Another 13 percent were noted as Protestant, 10 percent Catholic, and 3 percent “confession-less,” with no information available on a further 12 percent. Accepting the possibility that some Jewish soldiers may have avoided listing their religious background, Lackner concludes that “In any case, the numbers [of Jewish Austrian “Ritchie Boys”] could not have exceeded the 70 percent mark” (41). This may seem like quibbling, but it is symptomatic of Lackner's attempt to avoid the misleading generalities that he criticizes in the popular literature.

The author reveals how the Austrian graduates of Camp Ritchie had much to learn both as soldiers and as interrogators before they became successful in the field. But they did! Eventually, the military commanders to whom they were assigned recognized the usefulness of the contributions of these often inadequately trained soldiers but well-prepared interrogators. After the war, some stayed to assist the army at the Nuremberg Trials. Most, however, did not remain or return to Europe after their military service. Instead, they went to their homeland of choice: America. Some of them became professors, diplomats, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, though only a few years before they had fled penniless to the new world. Their army service led to their successful integration into American life. Lackner calls it a “veritable success story” (227). We can be grateful for his scholarly sharing of it.