MILITARY INTERROGATION:
A Game of Wits----or Torture?
This program was presented on March 16, 2008
This award-winning documentary is about "The Ritchie Boys," who escaped the Nazis, joined a special US Army unit trained in intelligence and prisoner interrogation, and worked in advance of the Allied Front after D-Day. The Panel Discussion on Prisoner Interrogation includes specialists in ethics, human rights, prisoner interrogation, terrorism and counter-intelligence, Congressional testimony, and government service.
Location: The Avalon Theatre is in Northwest Washington, on Connecticut Avenue, one block south of Chevy Chase Circle.
How to get tickets:
By phone: Call the Washington School of Psychiatry, 202-237-2700. Tickets are $12, credit cards accepted.
By mail: Send a check for $12 to Washington School of Psychiatry, 5028 Wisconsin Avenue, #400, Washington, DC 20016. Please include your email address for confirmation.
Day of the event: There will be a limited capacity to purchase tickets on the day of the event in the Avalon theatre lobby, which will open at 10:00am. No advance tickets can be purchased at the Avalon.
About the Film
"The Ritchie Boys" has been acclaimed by critics, shown in film festivals all over the world, and was short-listed among documentary films in 2005 for an Academy Award.
It tells a story that has never been told before. It begins in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, the birthplace of modern psychological warfare, and it ends with the defeat of Germany in May of 1945. After D-Day the Ritchie Boys became a decisive force in the war. Nobody knew the enemy, his culture and his language better than they. Their mission: ascertain and break the enemy's morale.
The surviving Ritchie Boys are in their eighties now. They never met for reunions. They did not join veteran associations. When the war was over, their German accents and unusual histories did not make them welcome in the usual veterans circles. In the end, the Ritchie Boys quietly left the war behind them and went on to enjoy quite remarkable careers - in arts and politics, in business and academia. They never forgot the war. They just never spoke about it.
In "The Ritchie Boys" these remarkable, funny, sharp, brave men share their memories with us. They tell about a war, quite different from the one we have known so far, a war of words. They had no idea what it would be like to see their homeland again. They did not know what had happened to the families and friends they had left behind. On the front lines from the beaches of Normandy onwards, the Ritchie Boys interrogated German prisoners, defectors and civilians, collected information of tactical and strategic importance: about troop size and movements, about the psychological situation of the enemy, and the inner workings of the Nazi-regime. They drafted leaflets, produced radio broadcasts and even published a German newspaper dropped behind enemy lines. In trucks equipped with amplifiers and loudspeakers, they went to the front lines and under heavy fire tried to persuade their German opponents to surrender.
The Ritchie Boys were in Paris even before its liberation. They fought in the Battle of the Bulge - in danger of being shot as spies by the Americans because of their accents, and by the Germans who might find out about their backgrounds. They were among those who liberated the concentration camps. They worked for the Nuremberg Trials and determined the policy for the de-nazification of Germany.
Christian Bauer, Director, says:
"I'm grateful that I finally could make this film--after fifteen years of waiting. I'm happy that the men who once were the "Ritchie Boys" are still around to tell their stories. For me and most other Germans they came as liberators. I'm ashamed that Germans drove them out of the country in which they were born. I mourn the families they lost in the holocaust. I hope that you will love each one of them as much as I do - for what they went through, and for the difference they made. For their courage, their charm, their wit, and for the intensity with which they tell us about their fight I want to celebrate them: They were not victims, they were victors!"
About the Panelists
MICHAEL GELLES, Psy.D. Panel Chair, is a psychologist and organizational consultant in the Washington area. For 16 years until 2006, he was the chief psychologist for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and before that a clinical psychologist for the Navy. He has served on the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Ethics and National Security, as well as similar groups. He has written and lectured on the subject of terrorism and counterintelligence. He is an alumnus and former faculty of the Washington School's Advanced Psychotherapy Training Program.
COLONEL STEVEN M. KLEINMAN, USAFR, is a career intelligence officer with more than twenty years of operational experience, including service as an interrogator during three major military campaigns. He is an expert on human intelligence, special operations, and special survival training. In addition to writing and lecturing extensively in these areas, he has testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Judiciary Committee as an expert witness.
RICHARD SCHIFTER, one of the "Ritchie Boys" in our film, practiced law in Washington, DC and, from 1981 to 2001 served, successively, as U.S. Representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Ambassador and Deputy U.S. Representative to the U.N. Security Council, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, Special Assistant to the President and Counselor at the National Security Council, and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State.
WSP's MORRIS PARLOFF -
one of the Ritchie Boys
Morris Parloff, PhD, is proud to have been one of the "Ritchie Boys." He is retired now and unable to be with us at this event, but he is fondly remembered and deeply valued by the many therapists he taught and supervised in his 40-year career in Washington. He is Faculty Emeritus of Washington School of Psychiatry, a founder of the WSP's Group Psychotherapy Training Program in 1967, and former President of the Mid-Atlantic Group Psychotherapy Society. He retired from the NIMH in 1983 as Chief of the Psychosocial Treatments Research Branch.
Morris was a gifted clinical researcher whose endeavors led to an incredible body of scientific literature--dozens of articles and book chapters, and co-authorship of four books or special reports. In Morris' own words:
"Remember we had a tremendous budget. As important to me as the conclusions of any of our research is the great respect I gained for the clinical skills and intuition of the therapist. The therapist doesn't have the luxury of money or time to break down all the variables and measure them. The therapist can't wait to understand how it all works. He does it and he KNOWS it works. It's artistry, really! If there's one thing I've learned it is just how incredibly complex the answers must be--not how research answers our questions, but how it informs so many more questions" (quoted from an interview in WSP NEWS, spring 2005, with David Benedek, MD, of USUHS).