Victor Brombert, a respected scholar of comparative literature 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.
Professor Brombert had the air of someone from another time and place, with his hard-to-place accent, his fondness for ascots, his genteel manner, his fluency in five languages and his erudite knowledge of European culture. But he did not publicly discuss his wartime exploits, which he would call part of “another life.”
He was born Victor Bromberg on Nov. 11, 1923, in Berlin. His father, Jacob, was a fifth-generation member of his family’s international fur trading company. His mother, Vera (Weinstein) Bromberg, was a high-level competitive bridge player.
His parents became refugees three times over: first from their native Russia, whose Communist revolution they fled during their honeymoon; then from Hitler’s Germany; and finally from Nazi-occupied Paris. The family arrived in New York in 1941, in the cargo hold of a banana freighter amid some 1,200 other dysentery-plagued refugees.
When he was 19, not yet even an American citizen, Victor was drafted into the Army and sent to Camp Ritchie, where he found thousands of other young refugees.
“Around me in this typically American, almost hillbilly country, I only heard foreign accents,” he said in the Ritchie Boys documentary.
Few of the men knew who had won the World Series, but some could discuss the paintings of Piero della Francesca and the conducting of Wilhelm Furtwängler. Professor Brombert often referred to Camp Ritchie as “my first university.”
His actual classroom experience there taught him the arts of espionage: how to establish contact with friendly guerrilla fighters, how to identify the rank of enemy soldiers, how to interrogate prisoners of war and civilians, how to interpret seized documents, how to use Morse code, how to kill someone silently from behind.
He changed the spelling of his surname, his family said, in response to a sense in his unit that a German name could be a liability in the event of capture.
On June 6, 1944, Master Sergeant Brombert became part of the first American armored division to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He heard bullets from a German plane strafing his position and felt certain he was going to die, he recalled in interviews. One plane dived directly at him. The earth trembled as bombs fell. Houses were gutted, walls collapsed into a flaming shambles, fields held corpses petrified in positions of violent death.
Amid such horrors, Sergeant Brombert decided that he would not allow war to corrupt his character. When he began to interrogate captured SS officers and French peasants, he eschewed violence and threats.
“Look, this is a bloody war,” he would say, he recalled in a 2022 interview with the American Veterans Center. “Aren’t we all tired of it? You might as well tell me what you know, because I know anyhow.”
With a soft touch, he learned how many soldiers lay ahead of his unit and where they would run into a machine gun nest.
Sergeant Brombert’s unit eventually reached the Seine, and he sneaked away to Paris in its first stirrings of liberation. He visited his old home, school and playground. In the heart of the city, he accepted wine from celebrating passers-by and, in fluent French, gave speeches whose content, he said, he was too drunk to remember. The war, he thought, was over. He dreamed of finding an apartment and a French girlfriend.
The Army had other ideas. Sergeant Brombert was assigned to the 28th Infantry Division, which was to fight in Germany. He and the other German-speaking Ritchie Boys gathered intelligence indicating a buildup of enemy troops. The American Army waved off the reports. It was a fateful error: A major German counteroffensive was on the way.
Sergeant Brombert’s unit endured a cataclysmic winter, fighting first in the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest — in which tens of thousands of men died in the mud and cold — and then in its momentous sequel, the Battle of the Bulge.
Sergeant Brombert groped his way through a chaotic dayslong retreat, running with no idea where he was going, hiding in a cellar under a mortar barrage. Making a quick decision to flee in an Army Jeep, he led a small group to safety behind Allied lines in Belgium. He later estimated that his division had gone from 14,000 men to about 200 — some killed, some captured and others who dispersed.
Finally, he reached his birthplace, Berlin, where he assisted in the arrest of Nazi officials.
Honorably discharged, he moved on from his wartime service and attended Yale, where he earned a bachelor’s in English in 1948 and a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature in 1953. He taught there until 1975, when he transferred to Princeton.
In 1948, while working as an assistant manager of a hotel in which his parents had invested in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he met a 19-year-old guest named Beth Archer. They married in 1950.
In addition to his wife, Professor Brombert is survived by their children, Marc and Lauren Brombert.
“During most of the years of our marriage, he didn’t talk about the war at all,” Beth Archer Brombert said in an interview. He associated the war with hellish scenes of death, with collaborationist French civilians, with silent Germans he interrogated during denazification, and with former Nazis he saw returning to power in the name of maintaining the German state.
After he appeared on “60 Minutes,” Professor Brombert said he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of letters from former students asking why he had never discussed his early life.
“I was supposed to talk about Stendhal, about Balzac, about Virginia Woolf,” he said. “But my war? No.”
That began to change in 1999, after he retired from teaching, and with the release of the Ritchie Boys documentary in 2004. “From that point on, the Ritchie Boys acquired an identity,” Ms. Brombert said. “A whole new world opened up.”
The same year, after avoiding every previous opportunity to revisit Omaha Beach, Professor Brombert finally went back for D-Day’s 60th anniversary.
The experience vindicated his earlier sense of dread. The manicured lawns and immaculate colonnade at the American cemetery there struck him as distasteful, false.
“I know that no memorial can ever tell the truth, and that stones are not alive,” he wrote in Princeton Alumni Weekly. “I kept thinking of past fear and trembling.”
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