INTERROGATION BY THE BOOK

IT’S BEEN SAID that any well-prepared interrogator, whether in a courtroom or on a battlefield, will strive to ask questions for which he already knows the answers. When it came to the interrogators of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service in World War II, Paul Fairbrook was someone who provided those answers. He was one of the “Ritchie Boys”: mostly young, German-speaking men—many of them Jewish refugees, like Fairbrook—who joined the U.S. Army early in the war and passed through the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland, north of Washington, D.C. Thanks to their native fluency in German, they proved to be ideal interrogators and intelligence analysts. Fairbrook was one of the latter.

After his four-week course at—essentially an encyclopedia of the Wehrmacht, detailing specific units, their commanders, their weapons, and their history in combat. There were a series of these color-coded books, each more comprehensive than the last, culminating in the “Red Book” of March 1945. Distributed to U.S. Army units in the field, they provided invaluable information to intelligence officers and prisoner interrogators.