On October 21, 1899, in Vienna, Austria, Karl Richard Waerndorfer was born directly into the vibrant hub of European modernist culture. His father, Friedrich (Fritz) Waerndorfer was not only the wealthy partner in one of the nation’s largest cotton textile companies; he was also an avid patron of the arts. Karl’s mother Lili (née Hellmann) was a translator and motor-car enthusiast who shared her husband’s passion for art. Karl had an older sister Helene and a younger brother Herbert.
The guests at the family’s formal dinner parties represented the cream of Austrian Jewish society, men such as composer/conductor Gustav Mahler, Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt, and graphic artist and designer Koloman Moser. The children would not have participated in these dinners, but they were all given private art lessons by the young expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele painted portraits of Karl’s father and of his sister Helene.
The Waerndorfer home was, quite literally, a living gallery of the best of European contemporary art. The architect/designer Josef Hoffmann, who was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, remodeled and furnished several rooms of the house in 1902/03; this included the Waerndorfer anteroom, dining room, study, and children’s room. Koloman Moser designed an art gallery for the family home, while the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the music room, which also boasted a large gesso panel, “The Seven Princesses,” created by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. The house was adorned with sixteen sculptures by the Belgian artist George Minne. The family had several Klimt paintings, including one of a pregnant nude (“Hope I”) , that was kept in a special locked showcase. The family’s flatware, which bore the initials LFW for Karl’s parents, was designed by Josef Hoffmann and was the talk of Viennese society.1 Josef Hoffmann’s room and flatware designs for the Waerndorfer family reflected his belief that art and function should merge and that this could best be accomplished if Vienna’s architects, designers, and artists allied themselves with skilled craftsmen in a close, cooperative arts community. In 1903 he and Koloman Moser established just such an organization. Called the Wiener Werkstätte [Vienna Workshops], this collective was made possible only through the strong financial backing of its third partner and business manager, Fritz Waerndorfer. It was housed in the city center, where it produced and sold fine furniture, leather goods, enamels, ceramics, stained glass, jewelry, and even postcards. Unfortunately, although it was “Vienna’s most glamorous design firm,” it “was always better at fabricating teapots and printing textiles than at turning a profit.”2 The reason for this was simple: the goods produced by the Wiener Werkstätte were far too expensive for anyone but members of the elite circle to which the Waerndorfers belonged. In 1907 Fritz’s expenditures increased even more when he persuaded the Wiener Werkstätte to open the Cabaret Fledermaus [The Bat Cabaret] on Vienna’s main street as a place where “none of the arts are excluded.” The venture was designed to demonstrate the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (totality of art) both through its artistic design and through its public
presentations of dance, music, and shadow plays. It was, its founders boasted, a place where the “boredom” of contemporary life would be replaced by “ease, art and culture.”3 This endeavor incorporated music and literature into the old arts collective and featured works by Vienna’s modernist writers: Peter Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, and Egon Friedell. But the endeavor stretched Fritz Waerndorfer’s resources beyond their limits, and after two years Fritz had to sell the cabaret and cash in his family’s shares in the textile business in order to pay a bank credit that was coming due. His debts continued to climb, and by 1913 he had squandered his personal fortune and a sizable portion of the company’s wealth. He was now forced to declare bankruptcy. Family members and friends—even his friend and cooperative co-founder Josef Hoffmann—intervened and pressured Fritz to leave the Wiener Werkstätte altogether. In order to protect the collective and to shield family members from further losses and shame, Fritz emigrated to America in March 1914. Karl joined him—against the family’s wishes— in January 1915.
He never returned to his homeland.
Up until his emigration Karl had led a privileged life, spending his first eight years in Vienna, in a rarified atmosphere of modernist art and classical music. He learned how to play chess at age five, and this became a lifelong passion. He spent winter holidays in the Alps, and summer holidays with his extended family—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins—at Grundlsee, an idyllic town set on a crystal-clear lake amid mountains and woodlands in the state of Salzburg.
Karl then went off to an elite boarding school in central Germany and stayed there for four years.4 He traveled widely to summer resorts in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland while he was a student in Germany. When his father’s finances got tight, he returned to Vienna and enrolled in the Higher Technical Education Institute (Höhere Technische Lehranstalt) in Mödling, to prepare for a career in engineering. Now, however, life took on darker overtones. In 1913 Fritz signed ownership of the family home over to his wife Lili, and the family was separated. Lili, Helene, and Herbert remained behind in Vienna and, after a year’s time, moved in with Lili’s mother.
It fell to Lili to dispose of the former home and contents. She failed in her attempts to sell
the house furnishings separately, since the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry said it was financially not in a position to purchase any of the furniture or house fittings. It was, in fact, a bad time to attempt any sales, since Austria was now embroiled in the First World War. Furthermore, as one historian has noted, there wasn’t any interest in the art of that period: “By this date art nouveau was too old-fashioned to be considered modern, and not old enough to be of historical interest.”5 In 1916 Lili sold the Waerndorfer home, fully furnished, and most of its furnishings disappeared.
Meanwhile, Fritz and Karl had moved to Florida, where they found employment as farm workers. To counter the anti-German hysteria of the period, they also changed the family name from Waerndorfer to Warndof. Fritz called himself “Fred,” and Karl became “Charles.”
The name change is only one example of how Karl/Charles accepted his change of fortune and embraced his new life in America. Except for the occasional German curse word, he immediately began to speak exclusively English.
And, in an even more determined move to leave Austria behind him, Charles entered Texas A&M University in 1916 as an ROTC cadet. Two years later he entered the Student Army Training Corps as a Private; this, plus the derivative citizenship he’d gotten through his father, earned him his own citizenship papers in 1920. This commitment to the American Army is particularly striking, since the United States had entered World War I and been fighting against his old homeland since April 1917.
At Texas A&M Charles was an active and popular student, whom his fellow students dubbed “Heinie” because of his strong Viennese accent. In spite of the accent, the yearbook for 1921 reported that Charles could “discuss fluently and intelligently all subjects ranging from soccer to physics. He proposes writing a vers libre interpretation of the latter science, claiming broad experience in this field. […] Many reform movements on the campus have originated in his fertile brain. He is Napoleonic in military matters but found his St. Helena in the Machine Gun School.”
During his years at Texas A&M Charles climbed from Private in Company G to Corporal in the Company D Infantry, to Sergeant in the Company H Infantry, to Staff Captain in his senior year. He was vice-president of the university’s Wanderer’s Club, captain of the school’s chess team, and assistant editor of the university yearbook.
Charles majored in Textile Engineering. Here he stood out in his senior year by making arrangements for A&M officials to bring a group of students to Waco to inspect the Waco cotton mills. Clearly, his family background in the cotton industry was shaping his career plans. To cite his yearbook again, “In China he expects to develop the cotton industry to an untold extent. Failing in this, he is assured the success of efforts in the old fields.”
Charles’s father Fritz also returned to the textile business, but on a far more modest scale than he had known in Europe. He would be employed as a designer for American Needlecrafts, a business owned by his sister, Lisa des Resnaudes. And he had also begun doing serious work as a painter.
After Charles graduated from Texas A&M in 1921 as Second Lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps, he took a job as a mechanic (loom fixer) at the Southern Cotton Mills in Brenham, Texas. He remained there only a year before taking a federal job in Savannah, Georgia, serving as a dredging inspector of the Savannah River for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1924 he was transferred to Brunswick, Georgia, where he was charged with surveying coast and inland waterways.
That same year Charles learned of a family tragedy back home in Austria. In preparation for a ladies’ motor car race in the Semmering Mountains outside Vienna, Charles’s mother Lili had taken a trial run of the course with his 19-year-old brother Herbert. As she was negotiating a curve, a tire burst and the car spun out of control, rolled over twice, and came to rest on the edge of the embankment. Both Lili and Herbert were thrown into the grass beside the road, but got up immediately and appeared to be unharmed. Then Herbert suddenly said, “I feel as if all my limbs are falling asleep,” and fell dead to the ground. Investigating doctors stated that he had apparently died either of a brain hemorrhage or a heart attack; his body did not show the slightest sign of injury.6 The tragedy served as a further wedge in Fritz and Lili’s marriage, one already exacerbated by their living on different continents.
The following year, Charles married Mary Boykin Carruthers. She was four years his junior; more significantly, she was the eldest daughter of James Stutz Carruthers, the engineer in charge of the Brunswick station where Charles was employed. It was probably a mismatch;
Mary was a young socialite whom the newspapers characterized as having a “sweet disposition and lovely traits of character” and of having “endeared herself to a large number of friends [here] and elsewhere,” with no mention of her having any life experiences or ambitions beyond marriage. Still, the marriage held until Mary’s death in 1968, and they raised three sons and a daughter.
Charles spent five years at the Brunswick station in a variety of jobs (in concrete products, harbor planning, and as plantation engineer), then was transferred to Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1929.
In Vicksburg the US Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for a large expanse of waterways in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, including nine watersheds and 460 miles of mainline Mississippi River levees. Except for his war service, Charles would remain in Vicksburg through most of his working career. His work would change, though, in that he was placed with the US Waterways Experiment Station in 1932 as the engineer in charge of construction and maintenance. And at the same time, he made a deeper commitment to the American military by taking a Reserve Officer’s Course in 1934 and becoming a Captain in the Mississippi National Guard, Company B, 106 Engineers.
It would seem that Charles had, by this time, put his entire Viennese past behind him. There were, however, vestiges of his past in his home. He had a fine collection of art pieces. He assembled a large vinyl collection of classical music and operas. And he constructed some Avant-Garde pieces of furniture that replicated designs by Josef Hoffmann.
Charles’s father Fritz had also cut most ties with his past. In 1930 he obtained a divorce from Lili and in 1932 married Fiona McCleary, an English-born pianist and composer who was a year younger than Charles. Fritz died in 1939 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Charles, however, still retained ties both to Lili and to his sister Helene, who had married a Viennese lawyer. But a second family tragedy struck in January 1938 when Helene was suddenly hospitalized, probably with pneumonia. On her third day of hospitalization she received the last rites. On the fifth, she died. The Catholic record book of city deaths stated that the cause of death was narcotic poisoning.
Lili’s mother also died in 1938. But 1938 was a critical year not only for Lili but for all the assimilated Jews of Vienna, as Hitler made good on his goal of “annexing” Austria. Helene’s husband quickly left the country and settled in Brazil. And Lili now took advantage of the derivative citizenship she had acquired through Fritz’s American naturalization papers and came to the United States. She moved in with Charles, but did not like the Mississippi climate, and so he made arrangements for her to return to Europe that fall as a language tutor to a young American army officer. Lili was a guest in Berlin at the now infamous reception given for Charles Lindbergh by the American ambassador—on which occasion Herman Goering awarded Lindbergh one of Germany’s highest decorations, the Order of the German Eagle. When America’s entry into war became more likely, there was a general exodus of Americans from Germany, and Lili returned to the States via Italy and Southern France. She settled in Piermont, then in Nyack, New York. Charles supported her for the rest of her life by sending her a monthly stipend. Lili became an active member of the Nyack Civic League, and retained membership in the Piermont Reformed Church. When she came down with inoperable brain cancer in 1952, she killed herself with an old-fashioned nickel-plated revolver.
During Lili’s New York years Charles rose through the ranks to become a Colonel in the American Army. Already in 1937 he had been awarded the Mississippi Magnolia Medal by the National Guard for outstanding service or extraordinary achievement. Specifically, he had selected, trained and supervised the map section of the 106th engineers, even though that was not under his purview, and produced “particularly accurate and meritorious [military] maps of Fort McClellan, Ala. in 1936 and Camp Shelby, Miss. in 1937.”7 Indeed, the officer in charge at Fort McClellan had noted that “in addition to being a neat appearing piece of drafting” the map had “all the earmarks of very painstaking and accurate work.”8 The following year the chief of the National Guard Bureau in Washington declared the 106th Engineers Regiment to be “the outstanding regiment of engineers in the US National Guard,” giving Company B of Vicksburg, under Charles’s command, “the lion’s share of this accomplishment.”9
Charles had a stocky figure, and was only 5’7 and a half inches tall, but his leadership skills clearly made him a towering figure.
In 1940 the 106th Engineers were incorporated directly into the American army. The idea was that, in addition to having met the requirements of engineers, the men could, when necessary, pick up a rifle and fight as infantry. The company was transferred to Camp Blanding, Florida, where the men under Charles’s command mapped the artillery ranges and handled all map reproduction attached to the functioning of the camp. His army service veered into intelligence work when, on January 16, 1942, the War Department opened up a training program at Camp Blanding for the interrogation of prisoners of war. Prior to this Charles had developed an experimental training program in prisoner interrogation; he was now named senior instructor and Officer in Charge of the new program. This program involved hours of student practice in mock interviews with “German” soldiers dressed in uniforms supplied by the Hollywood film studios. This program was moved to 3rd Army Headquarters at Camp Bullis, Texas, in the spring, and Charles went from there to Camp Ritchie in July, 1942, as Chief of its Section V training program (Enemy Armies). He brought his entire staff along when he transferred from Camp Bullis to Camp Ritchie.
One of Charles’s students, George Frenkel, talked about his training at Camp Bullis: “Well, the IPW, [interrogation of prisoners of war] training was conducted under the supervision of one of the finest men that I have ever met in the military. He was Viennese-born. He was -- I think at that time he was still a major, but later on he became a colonel, a man by the name of Warndof […]. Colonel Warndof was a winner; he seemed pretty grouchy, but actually he was a gentle and utterly decent man. I still think of him gratefully from time to time, because at various points he took me under his wing and I profited from that. Well, I took the course. It was on various aspects of intelligence extracted from prisoners of war. I did exceedingly well. I may have been the top student in my class.”10
George Frenkel was also transferred to Camp Ritchie. When Charles saw him there, “he was apparently very happy to see me again. I was very happy to see him again because I had a tremendous amount of respect for this gentleman.” Although George’s rank was Private First Class, Charles immediately made him one of Camp Ritchie’s interrogation instructors.
In doing this Charles was replicating what he had done for the map section of the 106th Engineers of the National Guard: selecting, training, and supervising all aspects of the interrogation program. “He was very, very intelligent,” George recalled. “He spoke English with quite an accent, but apparently the US Army had done one masterful thing and selected this man to be in charge of an intelligence operation when our intelligence effort, in my opinion, was very inadequate.”
The interrogation course was based on the the psychological principles of good marketing, as developed by Sanford Griffith, a British Security Coordination agent who had worked as a prisoner of war (POW) interrogator in World War I and as a British intelligence agent in the 1930’s. In his work in interrogation he had developed 16 principles for a successful interview. Charles reduced these principles to five interrogation components. He taught that an effective interrogator should:
Exhibit superior knowledge to the prisoner (about German military organization and individuals);
Serve as a friend to him (provide cigarettes, special privileges, etc.);
Introduce a subject of common interest (e.g. soccer);
Let the POW speak on his own subject, then pick a particular one of these to expand on;
Play on the POW’s sense of anxiety (e.g., threat to their families, the Russians, etc.).11
Charles was supervising a program that prepared men to extract information from the enemy. And to do this, the men needed to “exhibit superior knowledge” of the prisoner’s unit. To train for this, the Ritchie students were required to learn all the variations of Axis uniforms and all possible insignia that showed specialty and rank. Army reenactors were visible throughout the camp, wearing every conceivable type of German uniform. The students also had to have a thorough knowledge of German field organization. They had to know all types of weaponry and firing ranges and be able to identify weapons by sound alone. They learned to draw maps based on the information that they gathered from prisoners. They studied German military documents. The German soldiers’ pay books were especially valuable documents for the interrogators, since these listed all the prisoners’ military assignments; this provided an easy opening to a successful interrogation.
The Ritchie trainees were also required to study the German Order of Battle, so that they knew the names and character of commanders, the assignments of German troop movements, the history of individual units in battle. The course was extremely rigorous. As one frustrated GI put it: “Jesus, we have to memorize the history of every goddam German division, their fucking generals, their campaigns, the casualties they experienced, and even the firing power they have? […] I feel like I’m back in school learning history.”12
The work was extremely rigorous, and it was tested on a daily basis. In addition, the students performed countless interrogations at the camp on mock German prisoners, all of whom assumed different personality types in order to test the Ritchie Boys’ ability to adjust to the widest possible variety of interrogation situations.
Most importantly, the soldiers were taught always to abide by the terms of the Geneva Conventions. These stated that prisoners of war were required to give their captors no more
than name, rank, and serial number, and that they were not to be submitted to any physical harm or injury. The Ritchie Boys were taught, in fact, not even to lay a hand on a prisoner during an interrogation. They learned that courtesy towards a prisoner was a more effective tool than dominance, and that psychological trickery was far more effective than shouting.
Charles’s role at Camp Ritchie was a supervisory one. He maintained a tight control over the program and visited classes regularly in order to assess the success of his instructors. Weekly meetings were held to discuss problems and to make adjustments by refining the program and improving the instruction. Although Charles was demanding of his instructors, he won their respect, and he would look back on his years at Camp Ritchie as happy ones.
He had given up chess in 1935 in order to tend to a growing family; now, he found plenty of men willing to play chess with him, since, in his view, “Chess is a must among military students throughout the world, and is recommended to all professions requiring analytical thinking.”13He formed a particularly close-knit group with fellow officer instructors/administrators who were also graduates of Texas A&M. He remained at Camp Ritchie throughout the war, then was sent to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for a 3-month Engineer Reserve Officers Course before spending a year as commanding officer of the 1800 Engineers General Support Battalion.
Unfortunately, however, Charles’s last months of service were marred by health problems. They had begun in 1941, when he began to develop low back pain apparently caused by “extensive riding around in a hard-seated command car over rough terrain.” Over months the pain began to radiate down his left leg, and it was aggravated by coughing, sneezing, and “any exertion.” He was treated as an out-patient treatment at various hospitals with no apparent improvement; indeed, the sciatic pain in his left leg became worse, and he also developed severe arthritis in his elbows. For nearly six months in 1945/46 he was hospitalized; an operation on his spine brought no improvement. In January 1946 his medical examination showed “no essential difference from that noted upon entry in July of 1945 except for the addition of an operative scar in the lumbo-sacral region,” and he was declared permanently incapacitated for both general and limited service. He appeared
before the Army Retiring Board in January 1946 and was placed on terminal leave until he left active service in May.
He was given an official Separation Qualification Record that described the work that he had performed during the war: he had “supervised and was responsible for training for all interrogators of Prisoners of War (German, Italian, French, Spanish and Arabic) and experts on all matters pertaining to enemy armies. [He] compiled the course, set up the training schedule at the War Department Military Intelligence Training Center, Camp Ritchie, Md.” For his service, he was awarded the Legion of Merit. The Ritchie Boys also paid him tribute. One of his most distinguished students, Vernon Walters, wrote to Charles in 1975: “I remember Sec. V very well […]. I also remember the great drive and leadership that you gave to the whole show and how much American Intelligence is indebted to you.”14 Another Ritchie Boy, Guy Stern, said in 2013: “The demands were heavy on us throughout the war, but I never felt we were over-extended beyond our ability and our training. Virtually, there was nothing we encountered that we were not prepared for[,] thanks to our training at Camp Ritchie.”15
As soon as his army service was over, Charles returned to his home in Vicksburg and to his work as engineer at the US Waterways Experiment Station. And, despite his disability, he remained active as a combat engineer in the Organized Reserve Corps (ORC) with six tours (59 days) of active duty in the next five years.
Charles retired from the US Waterways Experiment Station in 1957; a year later he was transferred by the Army to the Retired Reserve in recognition of his honorable service and continued interest in the nation’s defense. And he made a major career change.
He had taken a job working with the Mississippi Highway Department when a call came to him from John W. Hull, President of Arkansas Polytechnic College—now Arkansas Tech University—in Russellville. Hull offered him a job in the school’s engineering program. Charles accepted immediately and in the fall of 1957 began as an assistant professor teaching drawing to engineering students. He remained at the school for ten years and declared, upon his retirement, that “of all the jobs I have had, this has been the most rewarding.”16
As he had in the Army, Charles rose through academia to become head of the engineering department. He appears to have been a popular professor who was involved in a number of student activities. He inaugurated a chess club at the school, and, after initial administrative resistance, had classical music piped into his classrooms from the FM radio stations. “Music has definitely improved the quantity and quality of the students’ work in class,” Charles declared. Besides, “We can cut off the music anytime that announcements need to be made over the PA system.”17
As he had at Ritchie, Charles demanded that his students work with great care and accuracy, thereby winning their respect, and he remained in touch with many of them after graduation. He also wrote occasional newspaper articles for the student newspaper. Generally these articles treated non-controversial topics such as engineering and chess. But at least one was a rant, that he wrote under the title “Illegitimum Now Carborundum” [“Bastards Now Fit To Be Ground Down”]. This was a word play on the mock-Latin phrase “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”. The article began: “One of the minor, though at times frightfully irritating disadvantages of our constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech is having to be exposed to the declamations, and, more often than not the fulminations of our small but vocal coterie of quasi- semi- demi- would-be half-baked half[-assed] self-anointed Intelligentsia!”18 Clearly, Charles had no compunctions about stating his strongly held conservative views, and he was extremely articulate in doing so.
By 1965, Charles and Mary’s marriage had reached an impasse. When he was asked about his future retirement plans, he left Mary out of the picture and speculated that he would “drift” from place to place until he became tired of traveling. Then he would “possibly settle down with [his] daughter and her children in Memphis.”19 Long before this the situation at home had become impossible: Mary had taken a bunch of cats into the house and, because of a stroke, was now confined to a wheelchair. Charles hated having the cats about, and the two shouted at each other constantly. The situation became so bad that Charles finally drove Mary to St. Simons Island, Georgia, where she moved in with family. That day, he said, was the “happiest day in my life.”20 In 1968 Mary filed for a divorce, but she died of another stroke before it could be acted upon.
Charles did indeed travel—to Alaska. But, instead of going to live with his daughter and her children as he’d thought he might, they came in 1968 to live with him in Russellville. After about a year Charles’s daughter remarried and left his home, but her children stayed on for a while. Charles spent every holiday with the family until his death in 1983. His granddaughter Beth remembers how students and professors would frequently come over to Charles’s home to play chess. Charles also spent many hours listening to his vinyl recordings of classical music and, especially, of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, “usually with a martini in hand.”
He was, Beth recalls, “very handy and yet practical.” He kept up his carpentry and made several pieces for family members. He also had a green thumb, and kept a garden of potted plants “from one end of his screened-in porch to the other” and enjoyed sitting in his porch swing and “watching his flowers grow.” He kept a vegetable garden as well.
Still, she has said, that although she has “lots of memories of him laughing with friends, family, and colleagues,” “it does seem to me now as I look back that as he aged he became quieter, more moody.” In a note to his son Joe he had written that he expected his demise “to take place between 1966 & 1976”21; however, he lived longer than he’d expected. His daughter mounted a big birthday celebration for him when he turned 80; it was attended by two of the cousins he had grown up with in Vienna.
Charles died when he was 83.
In many respects, Charles’s death echoed that of his mother. He had never been able to free himself from the debilitating back pain that he had acquired in 1941. In 1983 he acquired new symptoms, suggestive of cancer. Charles had always said that he would kill himself rather than lose his independence. On May 16th, he returned home after visiting a doctor who had given him several tests to see if his fears were indeed accurate. Charles did not wait for the results. That night, after passing blood, he went into his bedroom, and shot himself.
Beverley Driver Eddy
October 2024
“Fritz & Lili Waerndorfer: Art Patrons of the New Vienna,” The Blue Lantern—Arts Journalism for the Love of It. 3 July, 2013. https://thebluelantern.blogspot.com/2013/07/fritz-lili-waerndorfer-art-patrons-in.html
Jason Farago, “ ‘Wiener Werkstätte’: Going Broke for the Love of Beauty.” The New York Times, 15 Nov. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/arts/design/wiener-werkstatte-review-neue-galerie.html
“Vienna Cabaret Fledermaus,” Art Blart—art and cultural memory archive. https://artblart.com/tag/vienna-cabaret-fledermaus/
I am deeply indebted to granddaughter Beth Jones for much of the information on Charles Warndof from his non-Ritchie years and for photos 2. 3. 5. 7, and 9 reproduced in this paper, and to great-grandson Samuel Jones for helping me acquire materials from the Arkansas Tech University archives.
Peter Vergo, “The Vanished Frieze,” Ein moderner Nachmittag/A Thoroughly Modern Afternoon: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and the Salon Waerndorfer in Vienna. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2000, 40.
As reported in the Viennese press on 20. April 1924.
2 Dec. 1937. Citation in private possession.
letter from Major Russel M. Harrington to the Charles Warndof, 9 Dec. 1936. In private possession.
“Engineers Company Selected For Part In Army Maneuvers,” The Vicksburg Post, 20 July 1938, 10.
Brandon Bies, Sam Swersky, and Doug Heimlich, “Interview with George Frenkel,” in Fort Hunt Oral History, National Park Service, 5 Dec. 2006 and 18 Jan. 2007. https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/FOHU_oral_history/transcripts/PO%20Box%201142_Frankel,%20George_2016.pdf.
From a lecture delivered by Ritchie Boy Guy Stern at Fort Ritchie, Maryland, 21 Sept. 2013.
Lillian Belinfante Herzberg, Stephen’s Journey: A Sojourn into Freedom. Baltimore: Publish America, 2003,115.
C. R. Warndof, “Tech Chess Club Will Be Organized,” The Arka-Tech, undated (1960?), 4. All citations from this student newspaper are courtesy of Arkansas Tech University Archives, Ross Pendergraft Library, Russellville, News Bureau Collection, Series 2014, Folder 134.
Letter from Vernon Walters to Charles Warndof, 26. Aug. 1975. In private possession.
Stephanie Harbaugh, “Dr. Guy Stern to Tell the Story of the Ritchie Boys,” Record Herald, 7 Sept. 2013.
“Warndof To Retire In May 1967,” The Arka-Tech, 8 Nov. 1965, 1.
“Charles R. Warndof Celebrates 50th Anniversary in America, The Arka-Tech, 4 Feb. 1965.
Charles Warndof, “Illegitimum Now Carborundum”, The Arka-Tech. Undated clipping.
“Warndof To Retire In May 1967,” The Arka-Tech, 8 Nov. 1965, 1
Author correspondence with Beth Jones, October 2024.
Letter from Charles Warndof to son Joe Warndof, 8 Feb. 1966.