September 19, 1944 a requisitioned farmhouse outside Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 3 weeks after Allied forces liberated the city. The building still smells of the previous occupants, pipe tobacco, boot leather, and the particular bureaucratic staleness of a space where men sat at desks making decisions about other people’s lives.
The Germans used it as a regional administrative office for 14 months. The Americans have been using it as a forward processing point for 18 days. The room at the end of the upstairs corridor has a single table, two chairs, one window with the glass replaced by canvas, and an overhead bulb on a cord that swings slightly when the wind comes through the gaps in the frame.
Elagabalus didn’t just want to wear a uniform. He’s sitting in the chair on the far side of the table with a manila folder in front of him, unopened, and his hands folded on top of it. >> >> He has been in this room for 11 minutes. He arrived before the prisoner. He always does.
He finds it useful to already be present when they walk in. It gives him approximately 4 seconds to watch a man’s face before the man remembers to control it. In those 4 seconds, he has learned a person shows you almost everything about what they are afraid of. The man about to walk through the door has a great deal to be afraid of.
He does not know yet that the person waiting for him already knows exactly what it is. Sergeant First Class Aaron Feldman was 27 years old. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1917, the younger son of a Jewish textile merchant named Heinrich Feldman, whose family had lived in the same neighborhood of Sachsenhausen for four generations.
Aaron grew up speaking German the way only people who have never thought about it speak it, with the specific rhythm and vowel color of Frankfurt that immediately identifies a person’s district to anyone from the city. He was 19 years old when his father sat the family down in the kitchen of their apartment and explained that they were leaving.
It was October 1936. His father had read the direction of things carefully and early, which is why Aaron Feldman was still alive to sit in a chair in Eindhoven in September 1944. The family arrived in New York through Ellis Island in February 1937 with three suitcases and the address of a cousin in the Bronx written on a piece of paper in his mother’s coat pocket.
His father rebuilt something resembling a business within four years. Aaron finished high school in America, learned English with the same complete absorption he had brought to everything, and was working as a shipping clerk in Manhattan when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He enlisted the following week.
The Army’s military intelligence service found him at basic training, tested his German, and sent him to the classified intelligence training program at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where several hundred men like him, European refugees, most of them Jewish, most of them fluent in German, were being trained as interrogators, document analysts, and order of battle specialists.
They called themselves the Ritchie boys, though not yet publicly. The Army called them a full asset and kept them largely invisible. Aaron Feldman was assigned to the 12th Army Group’s forward intelligence section and had, by September 1944, conducted 63 prisoner interrogations across North Africa, Sicily, and northern France.
He was regarded by his superiors as the most precise interrogator in the section. Elagabalus didn’t just want to act like a woman, not because he was aggressive, but because he was patient, and because he read every file before he entered the room, and because he never asked a question he did not already know the answer to.
The Manila folder on the table in front of him was thicker than most. SS Karl Brenner was 46 years old, >> >> a career SS administrative officer from the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt am Main. He had joined the party in 1932 and the SS in 1934, rising through the administrative apparatus with the steady, unremarkable competence of a man who was good at processing things.
He had a law degree from the University of Frankfurt that he had completed in 1922, a wife named Ilse, two sons serving on the Eastern Front, and a 14-year record of unbroken service in the SS bureaucratic structure that his personnel file described as exemplary. Between November 1938 and June 1942, Brenner served as the senior administrative officer for the SS regional office in Frankfurt, a position that placed him in direct operational control of the Kristallnacht enforcement actions in the city in November 1938,
and the subsequent systematic processing of Frankfurt’s Jewish community for deportation to the camps >> >> between 1941 and 1942. He had not personally beaten anyone. He had not personally loaded any trains. He had sat at a desk and signed the orders that told other people to do those things, and he had done it with the careful accuracy of a man with a law degree who understood the importance of correct paperwork.
He was captured outside Eindhoven four days earlier when American forces overran the rear headquarters element he was attached to. He had been processed through two holding facilities before arriving at the farmhouse. He had given his name, rank, and service number at each stage, and nothing else.
He was, by his own account to the guards who processed him, a simple administrative officer with no intelligence value. He had been telling himself this for long enough. He had been telling himself made it feel true. By the autumn of 1944, the Allied advance through France and the Low Countries had generated a flood of German prisoners that the intelligence processing system was struggling to absorb.
Most captives were frontline soldiers who knew little beyond their own unit’s position and strength. Occasionally, a prisoner arrived carrying something more valuable, an officer with genuine knowledge of German order of battle, supply routes, or command decisions. These men were routed to the forward intelligence processing points and assigned to the specialized interrogators who had the language, the cultural knowledge, and the specific training to extract what was there.
Brenner had been flagged by a document analyst who reviewed the personnel papers found in his briefcase at capture. The analyst noted the Frankfurt posting, the dates, the administrative designation. He flagged the file to Feldman without editorial comment. Feldman read it that evening in his bunk. He read it twice.
>> >> Then, he set it on the table beside him and lay in the dark for a while looking at the ceiling. In the morning, he was in the room at the end of the corridor 20 minutes before they brought Brenner in. The guard opened the door and Brenner entered. He was a large man still carrying the physical bearing of someone accustomed to institutional authority >> >> despite four days in Allied custody.
He looked at Feldman seated across the table and registered a young man in an American uniform with sergeant stripes and a folder in front of him, and his expression settled into the composed neutrality of a man who has decided how this is going to go. He sat in the chair. Feldman said nothing for a moment. Then he said in German, “Good morning.
” Brenner’s eyes sharpened slightly at the quality of the German, the Frankfurt vowels, the exact register of a native speaker, and something almost like relief crossed his face. He replied in German, noting that Feldman spoke well. Feldman said, “Thank you.” And asked him to state his name and rank for the record.
Brenner complied. Then Brenner looked at the uniform more carefully, and looked at Feldman’s face, and said, in a tone that was not quite a question, “You are German.” Feldman said, “No.” He said he was American. He said he was from Frankfurt originally, but that he had been American for 6 years, and intended to remain so.
Brenner’s expression shifted into something cooler. He said, “So you are a refugee Jew, then.” Feldman looked at him for a moment without expression. He said, “Yes.” Then Brenner sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, and said that he would not be conducting this interview with a refugee Jew playing at being a soldier, >> >> and that he demanded to be transferred to a proper American officer for processing.
He said this in the same composed administrative tone he had used for everything else, as though it were a procedural request, rather than an act of contempt. He said that the Geneva Convention entitled a prisoner of his rank to appropriate treatment. He said this twice. Feldman did not call for the guard. He did not stand up.
He did not raise his voice. He opened the Manila folder. He said he understood Brenner’s position, and that he wanted to make his position equally clear before they continued. He said he had read Brenner’s file the previous evening, and that he had a few things he wanted to go through with him. He said this in the mild courteous tone of a man beginning a business meeting.
Brenner said he had nothing to say to a refugee. Feldman said that was fine and that he himself would do most of the talking for the moment. He looked down at the first page of the folder. He said, “Frankfurt Regional SS Administrative Office, November 9th and 10th, 1938.” He read the operational designations.
He read the street names where the enforcement actions had taken place. Elagabalus didn’t just want to act like a woman. He read the name inventoried for destruction >> >> under Brenner’s administrative authority. He read them in the same Frankfurt accent that Brenner had heard in his own office for 4 years and he read them without looking up.
Brenner had gone very still. Feldman turned to the next section of the folder. He said, “Deportation processing, Frankfurt Jewish Community, October 1941 through June 1942.” He read the transport numbers. He read the destination designations. He read the approximate figures attached to each transport, the numbers of people processed under orders bearing Brenner’s signature.
Then he stopped. He looked up. He said, “I want to tell you something before we go further.” He said that his family had lived in the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt for four generations. He said his father’s name was Heinrich Feldman and that his business had been on Textorstrasse. He said his father had left in 1936, early enough to survive, which was fortunate.
Elagabalus didn’t just want to act like a woman. He said that most of the people his father had known in that neighborhood had not left early enough. He said he had a list of their names in the back of the folder if Brenner wanted to see. He said he was going to ask Brenner some questions now about the current German order of battle in the Eindhoven sector.
And that Brenner was going to answer them away not because Feldman was threatening him but because the alternative was that Feldman would simply continue reading from the folder for as long as necessary and he had a great deal more to read. He turned to the next page and waited. Bren paid.
Brenner answered the first question after 40 seconds of silence. He answered the second without waiting. >> >> He answered every subsequent question in the session which lasted 3 hours and 20 minutes and he did not ask again to be transferred to a different interrogator. >> >> Aaron Feldman finished his service in Europe in May 1945.
He was discharged in October of that year and returned to New York where he worked for 11 years in his father’s textile business before establishing his own import firm in lower Manhattan. He married in 1948 and raised two daughters in Forest Hills, Queens. He never gave public testimony about his work as a Ritchie boy interrogator during the war.
He spoke about it once in 1989 at a small gathering of former Camp Ritchie veterans organized by a historian named Werner Angress, himself a Ritchie boy, who was compiling oral histories of the unit. Feldman spoke for about 20 minutes. He described several interrogations without naming the subjects. He said the thing he remembered most clearly about the work was that the prisoners almost always assumed that a Jewish interrogator would be emotional and that the assumption was almost always wrong and that this wrongness
was, in his experience, the single most useful tool he had. He died in 2003 at the age of 86. His daughter donated his service records and a small collection of notes to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans where they remain in the archive. Karl Brenner was held through the Allied Prisoner Processing System and his file was passed to the War Crimes Documentation Unit after the Eindhoven interrogation.
He was identified as a subject for investigation in the denazification proceedings, but his case was classified at the lower end of the major offender category on the grounds that his crimes, while administrative in nature, >> >> what were substantially documented. He was held until 1947 and released without a full trial due to the overwhelmed state of the post-war tribunal system, a decision that drew criticism from several Allied legal officers involved in the Frankfurt cases.
He returned to Germany and settled in a small town in Baden-Württemberg where he had no prior associations. He died in 1971. No obituary was published. Some military historians who have studied the Ritchie Boys program have noted that the use of Jewish refugees as interrogators of SS personnel created a psychological dynamic that could not replicate.
Not because of anger, not as the SS men generally expected, but because of knowledge, the specific, granular, intimate knowledge of German geography, culture, institutional language, and personal history that gave these interrogators an authority inside the room that rank alone could not produce. Ella Garbelis didn’t just want to act like a woman.
Others have raised it was appropriate to assign men to interrogate officers who had potentially been involved in the persecution of their own families, arguing that the personal stakes created a conflict of interest that compromised the integrity of the proceedings. What is certain is that the intelligence gathered by the Ritchie Boys during the European campaign was, by the assessment of their own commanding officers, consistently among the most operationally useful produced by any unit in the theater.
If you had been in Feldman’s position, sitting across the table from a man who had sitting across the signed the orders that emptied your neighborhood, and you had his file in front of you, what would you have said first? Leave your answer in the comments. And if you believe the stories of the men who fought this war with their minds rather than their rifles deserve to be told, subscribe.
Because we are just getting started.
