Detachment R Activated at Oberammergau (22 MAY 1947)
As World War II ended, General Edwin L. Sibert, G-2, U.S. Forces European Theater (USFET), directed the establishment of the European Theater Intelligence School (ETIS) at Oberammergau at the base of the Bavarian Alps 60 miles south of Munich. Focused on occupation duties, the school provided instruction on the German military and political organizations, as well as American intelligence disciplines, such as counterintelligence, order of battle, and photo interpretation. The next year, the school began offering German and Russian language classes.
As tensions rose with the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army saw a need for personnel who understood the language, culture, and political systems of Russia and the European Soviet Bloc countries that could pose a future threat. Consequently, on May 22, 1947, the Secretary of War directed the activation of Detachment R at what was by then known as the 7712th European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau. Assigned to the Army’s Intelligence Division in Washington, D.C., the new unit was to provide an intensive immersion course in Russian language, culture, and politics specifically to build up a pool of personnel prepared for diplomatic tours in the Soviet Union.
Commanded by Lt. Col. Theodore F. Hoffman, the Detachment R staff was comprised of a deputy commander (a major) and three noncommissioned officers. The initial faculty included seven former Soviet or East European nationals who had been hired out of Displaced Persons Camps in Bavaria. The new Russian course of instruction, a component of the Army’s Foreign Area Specialist Training (FAST) program, stretched across four years. For the first year, officers attended the Russian language course at the Army Intelligence School at Monterey, California. This was followed by a year of Russian studies at Columbia University before the students (ten per year) arrived in Germany for two years of intensive, immersive Russian language and area studies under Detachment R.
Classes ran eight hours per day Monday through Friday from October to June. Four class hours were dedicated to lectures on Russian politics, geography and economics, history, and military organization, all taught exclusively in Russian. Two hours were set aside for perfecting language skills, and the final two hours were for individual free study. During the summers, the students took field trips, some “connected with U.S. Army intelligence activities.” During the first ten years, students were able to travel to Moscow and other Soviet satellite capitals. Graduates were assigned as attachés, members of the U.S. Military Liaison Mission, or to intelligence staff positions focused on Soviet interests.
While attending the course at Oberammergau, the staff, faculty, and students resided in a hotel in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. By December 1948, because of housing shortages, Detachment R was ordered to move its operations about 130 miles north to Regensburg. As the housing situation improved in Garmisch in 1954, the Detachment moved back to Oberammergau. Ten years later, it moved again to Sheridan Barracks in Garmisch to consolidate the school and housing in one area.
In addition to its several moves, Detachment R underwent several administrative changes, although the course of instruction remained mostly constant. In 1967, it became the U.S. Army Institute for Advanced Russian and East European Studies, a sobriquet that set the stage for an unsuccessful attempt to add Czech and Polish to the curriculum. In October 1978, when it was subordinated to the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, the school was redesignated the U.S. Army Russian Institute (USARI). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, USARI was closed in 1993. In its place, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies was established and continues to offer its Eurasian Foreign Area Officer Training Program to select U.S. and allied military personnel.
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Article by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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