Richard Sonnenfeldt

When it came time to pick an interpreter for the Nazi war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, the prosecution settled on a man who barely escaped the Holocaust. As a child, Richard Sonnenfeldt fled Nazi Germany for boarding school in England, where, because of his nationality, he was declared an "enemy alien" and deported. On his way to an internment camp in Australia, he survived an attack by a German U-boat and was later abandoned in India when British officials realized he was Jewish. After being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Sonnenfeldt, who died Oct. 9 at 86, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. In 1945 the native German speaker became the U.S. military's chief interpreter at the Nuremberg trials--a post in which he interrogated several of Adolf Hitler's most sadistic henchmen, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess. After the trials ended, Sonnenfeldt almost never discussed them. It wasn't until 2002, after his grandchildren began asking him about World War II, that he decided to travel back to Germany to talk to schoolchildren about his remarkable story.