On February 19, 2023, I held the first of what I hope will be several launch events for my debut novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night. I made a short presentation covering the historical background and basis for the people, places, and events contained in the book. Here are my prepared remarks.
Thank you for coming to the launch event for my debut novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night.
Today, I’d like to share some of the history behind the novel and tell you a bit about the people and the places upon which the book is based.
People ask me how long it took to write the novel, and I answer, about 9 months, plus nearly 3 months of editing and revisions. But the story behind Grown Men Cry Out at Night began to reveal itself to me before I even put “virtual pen to virtual paper.” In the summer of 2021, there were two events that piqued my interest and convinced me I might have a story here, and it should be told.
First, there was a piece that appeared on the news program 60-Minutes that documented the wartime service of a group of men known as the “Ritchie Boys.” These were men who were called to serve at the beginning of WW2 and trained in the dark arts of war including intelligence collection, analysis, counterintelligence, espionage and counterespionage, and even close-combat, explosives and demolition, and sabotage. They were trained at a secret location in Western Maryland, named Camp Ritchie. Hence the nickname, the “Ritchie Boys.” Some 19,000 men were trained at Camp Ritchie and at other secret locations across the United States. About a quarter of them were Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe who escaped prior to Hitler’s rise to power. They were fluent in many languages including German, Polish, Russian, Czech, French, etc., but most importantly, they understood the culture, and understood what made our adversaries tick.
About 5,000 of the Ritchie Boys went on to serve within the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, which was referred to as an “army within the army.” The Counterintelligence Corps., or CIC, had broad latitude to operate and initially, many field commanders didn’t really know what to do with these men. But over time, commanders began to see their value because of the tactical intelligence they produced, and after the war, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said their efforts shortened the war by several years. I should briefly mention that there are some dark aspects to the history of the CIC, and I allude to that dark history in the book. But overall, these are men who performed their duty and served with distinction. Many of the men who served in the CIC went on to have illustrious post-war careers in industry, government, and academia.
The second event that captured my interest came to me while doing research about military and counterintelligence operations in the Bremen enclave, the U.S. Army controlled area within Occupied Germany that existed within the British zone of control. In the late summer of 2021, I became aware of the existence of a secret facility located on the outskirts of Bremen Germany.
As I learned more about this facility, the Valentin Bunker as it was called, I felt it should be a focal point of my novel.
The bunker is the largest facility of its kind in Germany, measuring about 1400 feet in length, 320 feet in width, and between 75-90 feet in height. It is a blockhouse type of construction, and made of concrete and steel, and the walls and ceilings are between 11 and 15 feet thick.
Construction on the Valentin Bunker began in February 1943 and ended in March 1945. The facility was never completed. The bunker’s purpose was to act as a protective shell for a submarine manufacturing and assembly facility, where the latest German U-boat, the “Type 21” was to be massed produced. The Type 21 was one of many German “wonder weapons” that had production started earlier, could possibly have altered the outcome of the war. But that aspect isn’t central to the plot of Grown Men Cry Out at Night. What is central to the plot is the toll of human suffering that went on there. The bunker and the camp that supported it were places where thousands of slave laborers had to survive on meager rations, live under terrible conditions, and were forced to work round the clock, seven days a week until they were systematically worked to death.
The workers were housed at the nearby Bremen-Farge concentration camp, which was one of the subcamps of the Neuengamme camp system. Initially, prisoners were accommodated in a giant, underground fuel tank. Eventually, barracks were constructed to accommodate the growing number of workers required to build the bunker, but the fuel tank remained in use, and continued to house prisoners for the duration of the construction, until the camp was abandoned.
The demanding, heavy work resulted in an extraordinarily high death rate amongst prisoners. During the roughly two years and two months while the site was under construction, the population of the Farge camp turned over at least two times and possibly as many as five to six times. As men were worked to death, they would be replaced by a new group of slave laborers who would meet the same fate.
Sadly, only the deaths of 553 French prisoners and 1 Irish prisoner have been confirmed. The total number of deaths is estimated to be between 6,000 – 15,000 but nobody knows for certain. The names of the Polish and Russian dead, which comprised the bulk of the workforce were never recorded.
What’s the book about?
Grown Men Cry Out at Night is a work of historical fiction, based on true events. It fits within the military / spy / espionage sub-categories. It’s set in Germany in the aftermath of World War II in 1946. All of Europe was in ruins. Millions of people became refugees. In Germany, more than 11 million non-Germans and 12 million Germans were displaced and had to be relocated. Homelessness was widespread. In Bremen alone more than 62 percent of the houses were destroyed by Allied air raids. There was widespread lawlessness, the black market was rampant, and people struggled to find food. As people tried to rebuild their lives from the last war, new battle lines for a new type of war, the Cold War were being drawn.
In Grown Men Cry Out at Night, Caspar Lehman, a battle-weary U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent is ordered to hunt down and capture a Gestapo officer, Oberleutnant Heinz-Ulrich Dettmer, a cruel and sadistic man responsible for security at the bunker and the Farge camp. I used the term battle-weary here. It’s a euphemism because the term PTSD did not exist in 1946. What we today call PTSD was then called “shell shock,” or “battle fatigue,” or “combat fatigue.”
Lehman is joined in the hunt by Ludmilla Haas, an ethnic Polish woman from the German city of Gdansk and former British SOE agent who is searching for her husband, a Polish resistance fighter who was captured and known to be working at the bunker. But Haas has a deeper agenda for capturing Dettmer. She believes Dettmer was the man responsible for compromising the SOE agent network that was active in Poland. Haas not only wants to find out what happened to her husband, but she wants to settle the score with Dettmer for destroying the agent network that she personally recruited.
As Lehman and Haas chase down Dettmer, Lehman, who was born in Bremen before the war and still has relatives living there, discovers his own family’s involvement in the very war crimes he seeks to avenge. He learns that his cousin, Therese Weber was the chief bookkeeper for the construction firm responsible for building the bunker. Weber has the detailed knowledge necessary to help Lehman and Haas capture Dettmer. The question is, can they convince her to cooperate?
A word about the four characters I have mentioned today.
Dettmer is a composite character who is based on two people who actually lived: the head of security for the Neuengamme camp system, who was the only person connected to this story that was actually tried and convicted of war crimes after the war, and the original SS commandant of the Farge camp, whose acts of cruelty and sadism were so horrific, even the SS decided he was too extreme, and they had to relieve him of command.
While Caspar Lehman is a fictional character, his service record in the book is based on the wartime service of a writer with whom you are probably familiar, J.D. Salinger, who was one of the more notable Ritchie Boys.
The character of Luba Haas is directly based on a woman who actually lived, named Krystyna Skarbek, or Christine Granville as she was known in Great Britain. Skarbek was the first woman to serve in the SOE and is considered one of Britain’s greatest secret agents, male or female. She served longer in combat than any other SOE agent. She was truly a heroic figure, and she was known to have worn a 9-inch-long Shanghai Knife strapped to her thigh, just as she does in my book.
Finally, the character Therese Weber is a fictional character who is loosely based upon the wartime experiences of my mother, who grew up, and lived in Bremen Germany. Like Weber, she was a war widow who lost her first husband and had to raise two children on her own, my half-sisters. She taught herself to speak English listening to Armed Forces Radio and by working at the Stars & Stripes on Camp Grohn. She also bought and sold goods on the black market, just as virtually every German did as a means to survive.
My mother didn’t work at the Valentin Bunker, and I do not know if she knew of its existence during the war. She wasn’t a bookkeeper, but such a person actually existed, and that person had to keep track of the number of workers on the project because that is one of the ways the German civilian companies got paid. Many German companies including Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Siemens, Krups, Thyssen, and others all profited and made millions off the work of slave laborers.
Today, I have touched on just a few of the historical references in the book and there are many more for readers to discover. Grown Men Cry Out at Night is a spy thriller that one reviewer says is “filled with high-octane action.” It is a dark story that another reviewer says will “stick with you,” but it does have a number of lighter, humorous moments. You learn for example that Therese’s mother has developed an affinity for spam, that sausage-like product that Therese acquires for them on the black market. It is also a story I hope will resonate with women. Therese Weber, though deeply flawed, is a strong woman who fights to care for her family and give her children a chance for a better life. And Luba Haas, a woman who has lost everything, her home, her husband, her country, continues to take on evil directly as she carves out a place for herself in the new world that has emerged from the ashes of war.
I hope readers will be able to connect to some of the deeper themes that run throughout the story. One such theme is complicity, and whether remaining silent and not speaking out against evil is the same as direct participation. Is looking on in silence the same as pulling the trigger or plunging the dagger into the heart of the victim?
The book asks the question, “Can one atone for actions that are crimes against humanity,” a term that did not exist prior to the Nuremburg Trials? And finally, it examines whether it is possible to forgive those who have committed unspeakable crimes and if the act of forgiveness absolves the perpetrator of responsibility.
I hope you as a reader are able to make these connections, but I also hope you learn about events and places you didn’t know about before. Above all, I hope you enjoy the story.
My debut novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or wherever you like to buy your books.
I would be happy to speak to your book club or organization about the historical background of Grown Men Cry Out at Night. Please contact me if you would like to schedule an event.