- Lieutenant Nathan Baskind served on D-Day and was reported missing on 23 June 1944.
- His fate remained unknown for decades until a plaque in Germany identified him.
- In December, his body was exhumed from a grave belonging to 52 Nazi soldiers.
The remains of a Jewish American soldier who went missing during World War II have been brought back to the United States, 80 years after he was discovered in a mass grave of Nazi soldiers.
Lt. Nathan Baskind, the son of Jewish Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, served on D-Day and was missing in action during the Battle of Cherbourg on June 23, 1944.
The soldier’s fate remained unknown for decades and his name is inscribed on the Missing Memorial at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.
A genealogist touring a German military cemetery noticed Baskind’s name on a plaque beneath three crosses and contacted Operation Benjamin, an organization that works to identify Jewish-American soldiers buried under mistaken religious headstones.
“This child was not able to sleep peacefully and was consumed with existential anxiety that he was associating with the enemy,” Shalom Lamb, co-founder of Operation Benjamin, told the New York Post.
“A Jewish kid from Pittsburgh is being buried with enemy soldiers,” he said emotionally.
According to the Defense Department’s POW/MIA Agency, Baskind served with Company C, 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, when he was shot by German soldiers while leading a platoon of four M-10 tank destroyers on June 23, 1944.
After the war, American Graves Registration Command officials learned from German records that Baskind had been taken prisoner of war and died of his wounds in a Luftwaffe hospital.
He was originally buried at the hospital with 23 other German soldiers, but in 1957, one of his identification papers was discovered when officials were combining his grave with another.
The German War Graves Commission (Volksbund) reported finding one of Baskind’s identification papers and part of his American uniform, but were unable to identify the body.
His body was then transferred to the Marigny German War Cemetery, along with 52 other Nazi soldiers.
After receiving a call about Baskind’s grave site, Rabbi Lamm and his partner, Rabbi Jacob J. Schachter, began the process of exhuming the body and bringing it home.
“I couldn’t stop until it was over. It was heartbreaking. I had to bring him home, that’s it,” Lamb said.
On an unrelated Memorial Day trip in 2023, Mr. Lamb and Mr. Schachter will lead a delegation of 60 people, becoming the first Jews to visit Baskind in 79 years.
Mr. Baskind’s great-niece, Samantha Baskind, a professor of art history and Holocaust studies at the University of Cleveland, pleaded with German Brigadier General Dirk Bakken to exhume the remains.
“It’s a huge hurt for my family to know that he was buried under a cross in a cemetery in Germany, so far from home,” Samantha told the Post.
The National League, working with civilian researchers and Operation Benjamin, was finally able to exhume the remains from the mass grave in December.
“The tomb itself was flooded and the soil was in terrible condition. Anthropologists said they wouldn’t find anything,” Lam said.
“At every stage the chances of success were getting lower and lower. It was a very bleak, very depressing situation.”
By February 2024, researchers confirmed they had isolated Baskind’s remains and confirmed his identity.
On May 29, he was transferred to the 21st Theater Logistics Command mortuary team and transported to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, where he will be interred later this year.
“My great-uncle’s recovery feels almost surreal and brings much-needed comfort to his family,” Samantha said.