Eighty years after dying from wounds suffered in the Battle of Cherbourg, U.S. Army 1st Lieutenant Nathan Baskind has been laid to rest alongside his fellow American soldiers at the Normandy American Cemetery in France, according to Fox News Digital.
Baskind, a Jewish American officer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, came ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day with the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion. On June 23, 1944, he was ambushed and shot during the Battle of Cherbourg. German records later revealed that he was taken prisoner and sent to a Luftwaffe field hospital, where he died from his wounds that same day. He was then buried in a mass grave alongside 23 Nazi soldiers.
After World War II, that mass grave was combined with another and moved to the Marigny (Normandie) German War Graves Cemetery. In 1957, the American Grave Registration Service attempted to identify Baskind's remains but failed. His unit patch, lieutenant's bars, and dog tag were recovered, but because no definitive identification could be made, his family was never told.
For decades, Baskind was simply listed as missing. His family had no idea what had become of him.
The breakthrough came through the nonprofit Operation Benjamin, which works to correct the headstones of Jewish American soldiers who were accidentally buried under a cross instead of a Star of David. A genealogist working with German military cemetery databases noticed something unusual.
"We were given a hint, sort of a curiosity from a wonderful genealogist who at that time did not work for us, although he does now, and he said he had come across something that he thought was very unusual," Operation Benjamin co-founder and chief historian Shalom Lamm told Fox News Digital. "That 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."
Operation Benjamin tracked down Baskind's identity and then located his next of kin, who turned out to be his great-niece, Samantha Baskind, an author and professor.
"When I first heard about Uncle Nate, I was floored. I didn't actually even believe at the beginning that this was true when I first received an email from Shalom," she told Fox News Digital.
Samantha Baskind described the long uncertainty about her great-uncle's fate as "a jagged scar that has run through our family."
Getting Baskind moved from the German cemetery to the Normandy American Cemetery required permission from multiple countries. Operation Benjamin navigated that process and ultimately succeeded in bringing the Jewish American lieutenant home to rest with his fellow servicemen, eight decades after his death.
