American Prisoners at Buchenwald

Christine Bannerman is working on a book about her father's experience as an American prisoner in Buchenwald during World War II. According to Bannerman, her father, Edwin Ritter, was with the OSS and he was an American soldier from Chicago, who was working with the French Underground. Buchenwald was a Class II concentration camp for political prisoners, mainly Communists, but it was also one of the main camps where French Resistance fighters were sent. It was not a place where American Prisoners of War were usually held, since there were separate German camps for POWs.

Some of the other men who were with Edwin Ritter as prisoners in Buchenwald were Bob Johnson, Fred Martini, and Andre Fleury. Ritter and Fred Martini had micro film implanted in their feet while at Buchenwald by a Belgium and Jewish Doctor at the camp, according to what he told his daughter in a taped interview. They were to take the film back to the United States. Ritter told his daughter that the micro film was taken out at a hospital in Boston upon their return.

Christine Bannerman wrote in an e-mail letter to me that these American prisoners were not in the camp for more than three months because a Luftwaffe General came to the camp on a weekend that the camp Commandant was gone, and seeing the Americans and Canadians there, took them from Buchenwald by train to Stalag III, which was a Prisoner of War camp. According to Edwin Ritter's story, the General's name was Black. Christine asked me to put this information on the web for anyone who might have any connection to this story.

Edwin Ritter told his daughter that he was trained at West Dover, Mass. and that he ended up with a group of American pilots that supplied the French Underground; they were known as the carpetbaggers. A similar story was told in a film shown on the History Channel called "Dropped From The Sky" about an American pilot who ended up with the French Underground after being shot down over France. In the film, the name of the pilot was Roy Allen and he was from Philadelphia. Allen was also sent to Buchenwald and was then transferred to a Prisoner of War camp. According to Christine Bannerman, there were some 80 to 160 pilots in the same program.

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