After 80 years in a mass grave with Nazi soldiers, a Jewish American officer finally rests among his own

On the exact day he died, eighty years later to the date, 1st Lt. Nathan Baskind of Pittsburgh was laid to rest at the Normandy American Cemetery with full military honors and in accordance with Jewish law. He had spent those eight decades buried in a mass grave alongside 23 Nazi soldiers in a German war cemetery, his identity lost, his family left without answers.

The June 23, 2024, reburial marked the end of a years-long effort by the nonprofit Operation Benjamin, which works to correct the burial records and headstones of Jewish American servicemen misidentified or improperly interred after World War II. Baskind’s case, though, went far beyond a headstone swap. It required permissions from three governments, a 17-person exhumation team, and DNA analysis that finally matched bone fragments to his living descendants.

The result: a Jewish American officer who fought his way ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day now lies under a Star of David, among fellow Americans, instead of in an unmarked corner of a German military cemetery in Marigny, Normandie.

Ambushed at Cherbourg

Baskind came ashore on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, as part of the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion. Seventeen days later, during the Battle of Cherbourg, German forces ambushed and shot him. He was taken prisoner, sent to a Luftwaffe field hospital, and died of his wounds, all on June 23, 1944.

The Germans buried him in a mass grave with 23 of their own dead. After the war, that grave was combined with another and relocated to the Marigny German War Graves Cemetery. In 1957, the American Grave Registration Service tried to identify his remains. The attempt failed. His unit patch, lieutenant’s bars, and dog tag were recovered, but without a definitive match, the Baskind family was never told.

For nearly eight decades, the family carried what his great-niece, Samantha Baskind, called “a jagged scar that has run through our family.”

A name that didn’t belong in a German database

The break came from an unlikely place. A genealogist, unnamed in Fox News Digital’s account of the reburial, was combing German military cemetery databases when he spotted a name that didn’t fit. Shalom Lamm, co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin, described the discovery:

“He was going through German databases of military cemeteries, people do that, and he found the name Nathan Baskind. And he said, that didn’t make sense to him because Nathan is not a German name.”

That tip set Operation Benjamin in motion. The organization tracked down Samantha Baskind, a professor and author, as Nathan’s closest living relative. Then came the hard part: securing permission from the United States, Germany, and France to open the grave.

The German War Graves Commission, the Volksbund, initially said no. Brigadier General Secretary General Dirk Backen cited the failed 1957 identification as grounds for refusal. But two things changed his mind: advances in DNA technology, and a video appeal from Samantha Baskind herself.

“Operation Benjamin presented a video from Professor Samantha Baskind, the grand-niece of Nathan B. Baskind, and she asked us for help. How can you say no to that?”

Three days, thousands of bones

In December, the precise year is not specified in available reporting, though the timeline points to late 2023, a team of 17 people descended on the Marigny cemetery. The group included Germans, Americans, anthropologists, and volunteers. They spent three days hand-exhuming the grave, sorting through what Lamm described as “thousands and thousands of bones.”

Tiny samples were sent to a laboratory in the United States. Operation Benjamin had already collected DNA from surviving Baskind family members. The result, in Lamm’s words:

“We had these tiny samples of bone analyzed in the United States… and we had prior to this gotten DNA samples from the remaining Baskind descendants, and we hit an absolutely spectacular match. We had Nathan Baskind.”

Samantha Baskind said she was “stunned” when Lamm called with the news. What followed was something no one expects to do for a relative who died before they were born: she chose a casket, signed documents for the disposition of remains, and planned a burial.

“I had to choose a casket and sign documents about the disposition of his remains, which of course is really emotional for me. And surprising, 80 years after my great-uncle died, I’m the next of kin and I’m planning his burial.”

Five-foot-five and built for a tank

Lamm offered a detail that brought the man behind the case file into sharper focus. Baskind stood five-foot-five, short even by 1940s standards, but ideal for a tank destroyer crewman. “Five-foot-five was short, even for those times,” Lamm noted, adding that it “made him perfect, of course, to be in a tank.”

Baskind received medals for his service. Those medals are now in Samantha Baskind’s possession. So is the weight of carrying his memory forward, a role she embraced publicly.

“As Nate’s great-niece, I am so proud that we found him, that I could participate in finding him, and that I can carry his memory forward forever.”

She also pushed back on a persistent historical falsehood, the claim that Jewish Americans did not serve in combat. Baskind, she said, “fought and gave up his life for this country’s freedoms.” Her summary was blunt: “His story shows us that freedoms are never free.”

A German general’s personal reckoning

One of the more striking threads in the story belongs to Backen, the German War Graves Commission official who ultimately approved the exhumation. Backen, a veteran of Afghanistan who served alongside American troops, disclosed that his own great-uncle died in nearly the same area of Normandy within days of Baskind’s death, fighting on the opposite side.

He reflected on what that proximity meant:

“Would they be able to shake hands? And all I could imagine was, I wish they would.”

Backen framed Germany’s cooperation not as a bureaucratic courtesy but as a statement of national direction. “It is about showing our neighbors, our friends, that we have chosen a different path now,” he said. He added a broader observation: “War is a curse. It’s a malaise to everyone, even for the winners.”

Under a Star of David, among Americans

On June 23, 2024, exactly 80 years after Nathan Baskind was ambushed at Cherbourg, he was buried at the Normandy American Cemetery. The ceremony followed Jewish law and tradition. Samantha Baskind received a folded flag and placed a rosette next to her great-uncle’s name on the Wall of the Missing, the memorial that had listed him for decades.

Seeing him buried under a Star of David alongside fellow American servicemen brought what she described as “a sense of closure that her family had been missing for decades.”

Lamm, who has spent years correcting the records of Jewish American soldiers, put the broader meaning plainly:

“People gave their lives, gave all of their tomorrows, so that we could have better todays, and that is something very, very profound.”

Operation Benjamin’s mission, correcting headstones of Jewish American soldiers buried under crosses instead of Stars of David, may sound like a matter of administrative detail. It is not. It is a matter of honoring men who served under the right flag and died under the right cause, and making sure the record says so.

Nathan Baskind spent 80 years in the wrong grave, in the wrong cemetery, among the wrong dead. Three nations, a team of 17, and one determined family finally set that right. The least a free country can do for the men who purchased its liberty is bury them properly, and remember their names.