The case of Army 1st Lt. Nathan B. Baskind was unique in the annals of the more than 73,000 U.S. service members still listed as missing in action from World War II, and the case had long gone cold.
The case of Army 1st Lt. Nathan B. Baskind was unique in the annals of the more than 73,000 U.S. service members still listed as missing in action from World War II, and the case had long gone cold.
His name was carved into a wall in the Garden of the Missing in the Normandy American Cemetery overlooking the invasion beaches along with more than 1,500 other American troops whose bodies were never identified or recovered after the landings and related operations.
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Through an extraordinary effort by Jewish advocates, his family, the Defense Department and other nations, Baskind’s remains were found and will finally be laid to rest in France this week, eight decades after his death in the war.
The initial efforts to recover Baskind’s remains after the war were fruitless, and the case was forgotten until Eric Feinstein, a genealogist in New Jersey working with the nonprofit group Operation Benjamin, came across Baskind’s name in German war records. “You should check it out,” Feinstein told Shalom Lamm, co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin.
Lamm immediately knew that the chance of finding and identifying Baskind’s remains was the longest of…
