United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Photo: Phil Kalina/Flickr.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum announced on Tuesday that it will honor a World War II military intelligence unit that included many Jewish refugees who fled to America and were instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany.

The Elie Wiesel Award, named after its first recipient and the museum’s founding chairman, “recognizes individuals whose actions embody the museum’s vision of a world where people confront hate, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.” Engraved on the award — the highest honor bestowed by the museum — is a quote from Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “One person of integrity can make a difference.”

In April 1942, in the midst of World War II, the US Army converted Fort Ritchie, a Maryland National Guard camp, into an intelligence training center. Approximately 20,000 men trained there, earning the nickname of the Ritchie Boys. Many were immigrants and refugees from more than 70 countries, including 2,800 German and Austrian refugees who fled Nazi persecution.

After their training, the Ritchie Boys were assigned to different Army units and “were involved in every major battle in Europe, using their language skills to gather intelligence, interpret enemy documents, and engage in psychological warfare encouraging German soldiers to surrender by dropping leaflets, through radio broadcasts, and in trucks equipped with loudspeakers,” the museum said. Many Ritchie Boys arrived in Normandy soon after D-Day, and hundreds of them helped liberate Nazi concentration camps and interviewed prisoners to document the horrors they endured.

In the course of their duties, two of these soldiers were captured and killed after being identified as German-born Jews.

Following the war, some of the Ritchie Boys served as interrogators during the Nuremberg Trials, according to the US Department of Defense. Many members of the unit also went on to have successful careers, including “The Catcher in the Rye” author J.D. Salinger.

The efforts of the Ritchie Boys, some 200 of whom are still alive, were officially recognized in August 2021 in the bipartisan US Senate Resolution 349.

“Their enormous contributions to defeating Nazism — one Army study concluded they were responsible for obtaining nearly 60 percent of the actionable intelligence gathered in Europe during the war — and their postwar justice efforts remain little known to Americans even today,” the museum said.

The award will be presented in the spring.