By David Spector | The New York Post
A Jewish-American World War II hero who stormed Utah beach on D-Day and went missing after being ambushed in the Battle of Cherbourg has finally been found — in a German mass grave where he was buried with Nazis.
Now, eight decades after his death on June 23, 1944, Lt. Nathan Baskind will finally receive a proper burial.
Baskind, the son of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants who settled in Pittsburgh and owned a wallpaper business, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 at the age of 26, according to Raugh Jewish Archives.
“He came from a successful family, he could have gotten out of [the war] if he wanted to,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder of Operation Benjamin, a non-profit that identifies Jewish U.S. war veterans buried under mistaken religious designations at American military cemeteries.
Baskind commanded four M-10 tank destroyers — modified Sherman tanks— in the US Army’s 899th Tank Destroyer battalion during the bloody D-Day invasion.
After taking the beachhead, Allied forces set their sights on the port city of Cherbourg, France.
As US troops engaged in fierce battles with Nazi soldiers, who were ordered by Adolf Hitler to hold the city at all costs, Baskind went behind enemy lines accompanied only by his driver on a reconnaissance mission.
They were ambushed.
The driver managed to get back to Allied lines despite being “seriously wounded,” and told how Baskind had been hit by machine-gun and rifle fire and was presumed dead, according to Baskind’s personnel file at the National Archives.
US troops conducted a thorough search but found “no trace of Lt. Baskind or his vehicle,” the file says.
He was listed as Missing in Action and on July 13, 1944, and was promoted posthumously from second to first lieutenant.
He was also awarded a Purple Heart.
Baskind’s name was added to the Wall of the Missing at the American Cemetery at Normandy, and what exactly happened to him would remain a mystery for eight decades.
In 2022, a US genealogist touring the German Marigny cemetery happened to notice that among the names of 17 German soldiers on a plaque at a burial mound was one name that didn’t seem to belong — Baskind’s.
He tipped off Operation Benjamin, and Lamm and his partner Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter began to investigate.
The sleuths determined it could be the long-missing lieutenant, and their senior genealogist, Rachel Silverman, got in touch with the German War Graves Commission, called the Volksbund.
They dug deep into their archives and unearthed detailed documents that finally shed light on Baskind’s fate.
He was captured after getting shot and brought to a squalid Luftwaffe hospital in Cherbourg known for its “cesspool” conditions.
He died the night of his capture.
His remains were dumped in a mass grave with 24 German soldiers in the hospital’s courtyard.
Then, in 1957, the mass grave was excavated and remains combined with another mass grave 50 miles away at the German Marigny cemetery.
It is there, beneath three gothic crosses, that Baskind’s remains were interred with 52 Nazi soldiers.
German officials discovered Baskind’s dog tag, a patch from the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and lieutenants’ bars.
They notified the US Army, which made two unsuccessful attempts to identify the remains.
Baskind’s family was informed his body was “unrecoverable” — but they were never told about the Nazi grave.
“You have a Jewish kid from Pittsburgh buried with these enemy soldiers,” Lamm told The Post, choking back tears.
Lamm and Rabbi Schacter, who teaches at Yeshiva University in NYC, became determined to recover Baskind’s remains and bring him home to his “family, his people, and his country.”
Their mission was personal.
Rabbi Schacter’s father, Rabbi Herschel Schacter, was a battlefield chaplain in World War II and the first American rabbi to enter a concentration camp during the liberation of Buchenwald.
“The narrative of my childhood was helping soldiers and helping Jews,” Rabbi Schacter said.
“I want to show — especially in today’s climate — that Jews played a role in fighting for America and are prepared to give our lives fighting for America.”
For Lamm, he felt he couldn’t have peace until Baskind could.
“I had tremendous existential angst, that this kid was not at rest, and was mixed up with the enemy,” Lamm said.
“I just couldn’t stop until we finished . . . It just tore at my soul. We had to bring him home, that was it.”
They had to navigate many obstacles over the next year.
The two had a cordial meeting with the German ambassador to Israel, Steffan Seibert, to seek permission to exhume the mass grave.
But not only did Germany decline to grant permission, one of Jerusalem’s top clerics, Rabbi Osher Weiss, also would not sign off on the plan because there was no known precedent in Jewish law regarding exhuming and reburying partial remains.
Lamm and Schacter knew that they would only be able to positively identify a fraction of Baskind’s bones, due to their advanced state of decomposition, and would have to leave the rest behind, posing a problem for Jewish law.
“It was just devastating,” Lamm said.
But soon they caught a lucky break.
Two researchers at Yeshiva University uncovered an obscure opinion published in 1908 by a Hungarian rabbi that said it was permissible to exhume the foot of an amputee buried in a non-Jewish cemetery to rebury in a Jewish one.
Lamm and Rabbi Schacter brought the opinion to Rabbi Weiss to see if it applied to Baskind.
They were stunned to learn that the author of the ancient opinion, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Glick, was Rabbi Weiss’ great-great-grandfather.
Rabbi Weiss declared what Lamm and Rabbi Schacter had in mind for Baskind was, in fact, kosher.
On Memorial Day 2023, on an unrelated trip to the Normandy and Brittany to install three Jewish headstones at American cemeteries, Lamm and Schacter led a delegation of 60 US Jews — 20 of whom were the children of Holocaust survivors — on a secret mission to the German war cemetery to visit Baskind’s grave.
They were the first Jews ever to visit Baskind in 79 years.
At his grave, they said the mourner’s kaddish and other traditional Jewish prayers and songs.
“We are family, we are brothers, we are sisters,” Rabbi Schacter said in an emotional graveside eulogy.
“We will never forget you.”
“Everybody cried, everybody,” Lamm said.
“It was a magical, very sad, very emotional moment.”
Prior to the trip, Lamm sought the blessing of Lt. Baskind’s great-niece, Samantha Baskind, a professor of art history and Holocaust studies at Cleveland University.
She had one request: “Would you put a stone there for me?” she asked.
That small, traditional gesture of placing a stone at a Jewish grave — which the Talmud says helps “keep a soul down in this world” — had great repercussions.
In a meeting with German Brigadier Gen. Dirk Backen, Lamm played a video of Baskind’s great-niece imploring him to allow Operation Benjamin to exhume his body.
“Knowing that he’s been buried in a German cemetery, so far from home and under a cross is a jagged scar for my family,” Professor Baskind said.
Since the Germans wanted to identify the remains of a different soldier in the same mass grave, permission to exhume was finally granted.
The coincidence “was amazing,” Lamm said.
The exhumation “had to be carried out under great time pressure,” German Director for International Relationships Arne Schrader said.
“One of the Volksbund’s main tasks is to fulfill the wishes of families, whether German or American, in order to heal the scars of war – even after 80 years.”
Over the course of three days, Dec. 18 – 20, a team of 17, including French and German anthropologists and experts from the University of Wisconsin, worked to dig up the gravesite at Marigny.
“I felt terrified,” Lamm said.
“It’s great to talk about it in theory but what if we’re wrong? What if we can’t find him? This is our one and only shot.”
The chances of finding Baskind’s remains were slim.
There were 10,000 bones buried in the mass grave and it was unknown how many would be viable for DNA testing.
“We were exhausted, out of our minds,” Lamm said.
“The grave itself was soaked in water, the dirt was the worst soil condition you could have. The anthropologists were saying you’re not gonna find anything.”
“At every stage our chances of success get lower and lower and lower. It was looking very bleak, very depressing.”
After extracting an “enormous amount of bones” and separating the potential matches for Baskind for DNA testing, the rest of the remains had to be re-buried.
A German official enlisted Lamm, an orthodox Jew, to lead the service for the 52 German soldiers.
“I had a moment of panic,” Lamm confessed.
“You can’t make up a more surreal . . . circumstance.”
In his speech at the grave, Lamm recounted the Jewish practice of spilling out drops of wine on Passover as a symbol that they do not exalt in the demise of their enemies.
“You are those drops of wine,” Lamm said of the fallen Germans.
Four weeks later, the moment of truth arrived.
DNA lab results came back and revealed the bones were a 99.989% match with DNA samples provided by Baskind’s surviving family members.
After 79 years missing, Lt. Baskind was finally found.
“The match was spectacular — that was the hand of God,” Lamm said.
“The recovery of my great uncle… is almost surreal… it brings a measure of long-awaited solace to my family,” Professor Baskind said.
Professor Baskind formally received her great-uncle’s Purple Heart from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency on May 22.
The German Army formally handed over the remains of Lt. Baskind to the US Army in a ceremony at Ramstein Airforce Base on May 28.
On June 23, the 80th anniversary of his death, the American hero will be buried at the American cemetery in Normandy with full military honors in a Jewish ceremony presided over by Rabbi Schacter.
At the Wall of the Missing, to signify he is the 25th soldier to be recovered out of 1,551, Professor Baskind will insert a gold rosette with a red stone next to her uncle’s name.
