General
Victor Brombert, Scholar With a Secret Army Past, Dies at 101
As a German Jewish teen, he fled the Nazis for America — then landed at D-Day and swept across Europe in a unit that gathered intelligence. Its work was hidden for decades.
Victor Brombert, an unassuming comparative literature professor who late in life revealed that he had worked for a secret American intelligence program in World War II, which took him to D-Day, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge, died on Nov. 26 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Beth Archer Brombert.
Professor Brombert (pronounced BROM-bear) was one of the Ritchie Boys, a U.S. Army unit whose members, armed with foreign language skills, gathered battlefield intelligence in Europe. Many of them, like Professor Brombert, were Jewish refugees from fascism. They were all trained at Camp Ritchie in rural Maryland.
The program was little known until “The Ritchie Boys,” an acclaimed documentary by Christian Bauer, came out in 2004. The group became an object of public fascination, and it was widely reported that its members had fought in every major European battle and supplied most of the intelligence that the United States gathered on the continent.
Professor Brombert was one of the film’s main interviewees. He became a major figure in other histories of the Ritchie Boys and appeared on “60 Minutes.”
Until then, he had been known mainly as an intellectual historian at Princeton and Yale. He contributed articles about French culture to The New York Times Book Review from the early 1960s to the late ’90s. He wrote book-length studies of literary tropes — on the antihero and what he called “the intellectual hero” — as well as books of criticism about authors like Stendhal, Flaubert and Victor Hugo.
