In September 1944, a requisitioned farmhouse outside Eindhoven, Netherlands, served as a forward processing point for American intelligence. The building had been a German regional administrative office for 14 months. The Americans had been using it for 18 days.
In a room at the end of the upstairs corridor sat Sergeant First Class Aaron Feldman. He was 27 years old, born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1917. His family were Jewish textile merchants who had lived in the Sachsenhausen district for four generations.
Feldman’s father saw the direction of events early and moved the family to New York in February 1937. Aaron finished high school in America and was working as a shipping clerk when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted the following week.
Military intelligence found him at basic training. He was sent to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where European refugees fluent in German were trained as interrogators. They called themselves the Ritchie Boys.
By September 1944, Feldman had conducted 63 prisoner interrogations across North Africa, Sicily, and northern France. His superiors regarded him as the most precise interrogator in the section. He read every file before entering the room and never asked a question he did not already know the answer to.
The manila folder on the table was thicker than most. It belonged to SS officer Karl Brenner, 46 years old, a career administrative officer from the same district of Frankfurt as Feldman. Brenner had a law degree, a wife named Ilse, and two sons on the Eastern Front.
Between November 1938 and June 1942, Brenner served as senior administrative officer for the SS regional office in Frankfurt. His position placed him in direct operational control of Kristallnacht enforcement actions and the systematic processing of Frankfurt’s Jewish community for deportation.
Brenner had not personally beaten anyone or loaded trains. He sat at a desk and signed orders that told other people to do those things. He was captured outside Eindhoven four days earlier and had given only his name, rank, and service number.
When the guard opened the door, Brenner entered and saw a young man in an American uniform with sergeant’s stripes. Feldman said in German, “Good morning.” Brenner’s eyes sharpened at the quality of the German, the exact Frankfurt vowels of a native speaker.
Brenner asked if Feldman was German. Feldman said no, he was American, though he was from Frankfurt originally. Brenner’s expression shifted cooler. He said, “So you are a refugee Jew then?”
Feldman said yes. Brenner sat back, crossed his arms, and said he would not conduct this interview with a refugee Jew playing at being a soldier. He demanded transfer to a proper American officer.
Feldman did not call for a guard or raise his voice. He opened the folder and said he understood Brenner’s position. He said he had read Brenner’s file the previous evening and had a few things to go through.
He read the operational designations from November 9th and 10th, 1938. He read street names where enforcement actions had taken place. He read names inventoried for destruction under Brenner’s administrative authority, all in the same Frankfurt accent Brenner had heard in his own office for years.
Feldman turned to the next section. He read transport numbers, destination designations, and approximate figures attached to each deportation transport between October 1941 and June 1942. These were orders bearing Brenner’s signature.
Then Feldman stopped and looked up. He said his family had lived in Sachsenhausen for four generations. His father’s name was Heinrich Feldman, and his business had been on Textor Strasse. His father left in 1936, early enough to survive.
Feldman said most of the people his father had known in that neighborhood had not left early enough. He had a list of their names in the back of the folder if Brenner wanted to see it.
He told Brenner he was going to ask questions about the current German order of battle in the Eindhoven sector. Brenner would answer not because Feldman was threatening him, but because the alternative was that Feldman would simply continue reading from the folder for as long as necessary.
Brenner answered the first question after 40 seconds of silence. He answered the second without waiting. He answered every subsequent question in the session, which lasted 3 hours and 20 minutes. He did not ask again to be transferred.
Aaron Feldman finished his service in Europe in May 1945. He returned to New York, worked in his father’s textile business, and later established his own import firm. He married in 1948 and raised two daughters in Queens.
He never gave public testimony about his wartime work. In 1989, he spoke once at a gathering of former Camp Ritchie veterans. He said prisoners almost always assumed a Jewish interrogator would be emotional, and that assumption was almost always wrong. That wrongness was, in his experience, the single most useful tool he had.
Feldman died in 2003 at age 86. His daughter donated his service records to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
Karl Brenner was held through the Allied prisoner processing system. His file was passed to the War Crimes Documentation Unit after the interrogation. He was held until 1947 and released without a full trial due to the overwhelmed post-war tribunal system.
He returned to Germany and settled in a small town in Baden-Württemberg, where he had no prior associations. He died in 1971. No obituary was published.
Military historians have noted that the use of Jewish refugees as interrogators of SS personnel created a psychological dynamic others could not replicate. It was not about anger, which the SS men generally expected, but about knowledge. The specific, granular, intimate knowledge of German geography, culture, institutional language, and personal history gave these interrogators an authority that rank alone could not produce.
The intelligence gathered by the Ritchie Boys during the European campaign was consistently among the most operationally useful produced by any unit in the theater.