Episode notes Guy Stern, a former WSU provost, vice president and distinguished professor of German literature who recently turned 100 years old, talks about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, World War II veteran, scholar, administrator and community pillar.
About Gunther “Guy” Stern was born Jan. 14, 1922 in Hildesheim, Germany. He was the only member of his five-person family to escape to the United States in 1937, where he was assisted by an aunt and uncle in St. Louis and an American-Jewish agency. Later, despite his best efforts, he was unable to secure passage overseas for the rest of his family and learned that his whole family had been deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, where they died.
Stern began studying romance languages in 1940, later studying German. In 1942, he volunteered for naval intelligence but was initially rejected because he was not born in the United States; he was subsequently drafted in 1943. In 1944, he landed in Normandy three days after D-Day as a member of the Ritchie Boys: a special military intelligence unit composed mainly of German, Austrian and Czech refugees and immigrants to the United States, mostly of Jewish descent. Part of Stern’s duty was the interrogation of German prisoners of war and defectors. He was member of IPW Team 37, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
Following the war, Stern returned to his studies, earning a bachelor of arts in romance languages in 1948 from Hofstra University, and then a master of arts in Germanistics in 1950 as well as a Ph.D. in 1953 from Columbia University. After teaching at Columbia, he received an assistant professorship at Denison University, and was later named professor and head of the German language and literature at the University of Cincinnati. Stern later became head of the German and Slavic studies department at the University of Maryland. Until his retirement in 2003, he served as a distinguished professor of German literature and cultural history at Wayne State University and intermittently as senior vice president and provost. He was also a visiting scholar at the German universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Potsdam and Munich.
Stern is currently the director of The Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills. He is one of the founders of the Lessing Society at the University of Cincinnati, acting as its president from 1975 until 1977. As an author and editor, Stern has published several books and compilations on German literary history, focusing primarily on literature on emigration and immigration. In 1998, he gave a lecture at the 60th anniversary of the Kristallnacht at the German parliament Bundestag in Bonn.
Stern has been honored with several awards throughout his life, among them the Great Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987 and the Goethe Medal in 1989. He has also received an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University.
Stern is married to the German author Susanna Piontek. He turned 100 on Jan. 14, 2022.
Additional resources Learn more about Stern’s memoir, Invisible Ink: wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/invisible-ink
Read about Stern’s work at Wayne State: clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/ad5422
Watch a CBS News report about Stern: cbsnews.com/news/ritchie-boy-guy-stern-world-war-ii-2022-01-02
Watch the 60 Minutes segment on the Ritchie Boys: youtube.com/watch?v=nFwnh1eG6BI
Learn more about the Zekelman Holocaust Center: holocaustcenter.org
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