Fritz G. A. Kraemer

Who was Fritz G. A. Kraemer?

Fritz Gustav Anton Kraemer was a German-American military educator and advisor.

Kraemer was born in Essen, Germany, the eldest child of Georg Kraemer and Anna Johanna Kraemer, née Goldschmidt and studied at the famous Arndt Gymnasium in Berlin, the London School of Economics and the Universities of Geneva and Frankfurt before earning a doctorate in law at the University of Frankfurt in 1931 and a doctorate in Political Science at the University of Rome in 1934.

During most of the 1930s he was Senior Legal Advisor to the League of Nations at the League’s Legal Institute in Rome. In 1933, he married his wife, Britta Bjorkander, a Swedish citizen.

Kraemer, a Lutheran with a dislike for Nazis, escaped Nazi Germany for America in 1939, leaving behind his wife and son. He was drafted and became a U.S. citizen as an inductee and joined the United States Army in April 1943 as an infantryman in the 84th Infantry Division.

Kraemer fought in the Battle of the Bulge and in the battles of the Ruhr and Rhineland, earning a Battlefield Commission and a Bronze Star in the liberation of his former homeland. In 1945 Kraemer was reunited with his wife and son and returned to Washington, DC, in 1947. He left active duty in 1948 and retired from the Army Reserve in 1963 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.