Richard Schifter
| Richard Schifter | |
|---|---|
| Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor | |
|
In office October 31, 1985 – April 3, 1992 |
|
| President | George H. W. Bush |
| Preceded by | Elliott Abrams |
| Succeeded by | Patricia Diaz Dennis |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
July 31, 1923 Vienna |
| Education | City College of New York, Yale Law School |
Richard Schifter (born July 31, 1923) is a United States lawyer. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1985 to 1992, and has held many other important posts.
Richard Schifter was born in Vienna on July 31, 1923 into a Jewish family. (His family was in Vienna after having been displaced from Poland.) In the wake of the Anschluss by which the First Austrian Republic was annexed by Nazi Germany on March 12/13, 1938, Schifter's family sought permission for all of them to emigrate to the USA, but Richard Schifter was the only member of the family able to obtain a United States visa. This tragic situation arose since he had been born in Austria, and therefore came under the USA. Austrian immigration quota, which was not full. His parents, since born in Poland, were in the Polish quota, in a long queue which was 3 years long. He immigrated to the United States without his family in Dec. 1938, at age 15. In the U.S., he studied at CCNY, the College of the City of New York, where he received a B.A. in 1943.
Schifter then joined the United States Army, becoming one of the Ritchie Boys, young Jewish German refugees whom the U.S. Army trained in the art of psychological warfare. Most importantly, since they all were fluent German-speakers, all the Ritchie Boys were trained primarily in all aspects of Intelligence work. This was with the specific intent that they be involved in interrogating captured German soldiers of all ranks as well as civilians; and in gathering and interpreting captured German documents, both during the war and afterwards.
He was present for the Normandy landings. and did intelligence work in the field. After the Battle of the Bulge, he was stationed in Aachen and tasked with interviewing the civilian population, thus producing one of the first studies of daily life under the Third Reich. He searched for his family after the war, but they had all been killed in the Holocaust. He was discharged from the Army in 1946, but stayed in Allied-occupied Germany working for the U.S. military government as a civilian until 1948.
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