‘We would not have won without them’: Honoring Omaha’s ‘Ritchie Boy’

By Rob McCartney

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    OMAHA (KETV) — On the 80th anniversary of “Victory in Europe” Day, the end of World War Two in Europe, an Omaha family is sharing some of the amazing artifacts, and stories, their loved one brought back from the war.

“This is Heinrich Himmler’s wet ink signature!”

Aaron Parsow’s grandfather, Warner Frohman, was part of a group of soldiers that helped bring down Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Frohman was born in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1935 and when Hitler started coming to power, he and his family moved to Omaha.

Then, when the United States got involved in World War Two, Frohman signed up.

“The first thing my grandpa tried to do is get into the Army because he felt like he wanted to go and fight the Nazis because they kicked him out,” Parsow said.

A lot of other Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria felt the same way and they ended up becoming “Ritchie Boys” who trained at the top-secret Camp Ritchie located in the mountains of Maryland.

The soldiers learned counterintelligence, interrogation of German prisoners of war, and more.

“He would say, you know, when I’d interrogate these Nazis, I’d tell him I was a Jew,” Parsow said his grandfather was trying to get into the prisoners’ heads.

That story is just one of the many that Parsow has uncovered in his research of the artifacts his grandfather brought back from Europe.

“A picture of my grandpa with several officers in one of Hermann Goering’s confiscated Mercedes,” Parsow showed pieces taken from the head of the Luftwaffe, “That’s Goering’s wife’s sewing kit that he sent back to, my great grandma. The letter was written on Goering’s personal stationery. They were celebrating VE Day, and he was writing a letter to his parents.”

There are Nazi knives, possibly given to Hitler Youth.

There’s a spy’s camera and his gun that was discovered during an interrogation.

“Had him strip searched and this spy pistol just kind of fell out of his sock or something,” Parsow explained.

The “Ritchie Boys” interrogated tens of thousands of prisoners, getting critical information and Katy Self, who is the Director and Curator of the Ritchie Museum said they were invaluable to winning the war.

“We would not have won without them,” she said.

Self said the soldiers not only knew the German language; they also personally knew the brutality of the Nazi psychology.

Even though they did, they still went back to Germany to fight.

And it cost many of them, everything.

”Not all of the Ritchie Boys returned home. Many of them were killed in work camps or some were found out to be Jews upon capture and several executed,” Self said.

Fortunately, Frohman did make it home and the collection he brought with him gives his family, and now the people who can see on display at Omaha’s Jewish Community Center, a front seat to one of the most iconic moments of the fall of the Third Reich.

“He was at Nuremberg Stadium with the Army when they lifted the flag up over the swastika, where Adolf Hitler used to have all of his big rallies, and then the Corps of Engineers actually blew up that swastika,” Parsow said as he showed KETV NewsWatch 7 more photographs brought home by Frohman.

He said it is important for the Omaha community know that one of their own was one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation.

“Omaha was super special to him. The Jewish community here was very special to him and his family. They welcomed him. He became a leader in the community and did a lot of service, you know, community service for the Jewish community here, the synagogue was very important to him. I just wish I knew him better.

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