More than eight decades after American Jewish soldiers fought and died in World War II, an organization dedicated to restoring their Jewish identities has bestowed its first and highest honor on a retired German general.
Operation Benjamin presented the inaugural Order of the Marble Star of David to Dirk Backen, secretary general of the German War Graves Commission, during the organization’s June mission to France.
The organization identifies American Jewish service members mistakenly buried beneath crosses and works with their families and the U.S. government to replace the markers with Stars of David. The new award is a 9-inch marble Star of David modeled after the headstones used to mark the graves of Jewish U.S. service members.
Backen, a retired German Army brigadier general who served in Afghanistan and later as defense attaché at the German Embassy in Washington, became involved with Operation Benjamin through the case of 1st Lt. Nathan Baskind, a Jewish American officer from Pittsburgh.
Baskind landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion and was killed on June 23, 1944, during the Battle of Cherbourg. His remains were buried in a mass grave with German soldiers at the Marigny German War Cemetery in Normandy and remained unidentified for nearly 80 years.
Recovering him appeared nearly impossible.
Shalom Lamm, a co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin who lives in Jerusalem, traveled to Berlin and showed Backen a video in which Baskind’s great-niece, Samantha Baskind, appealed for help bringing her great-uncle home.
“He turns to me, and he says, ‘Let’s bring this boy home,’” Lamm told JNS. “Seven or eight months later, we were in a German World War II cemetery with the biggest monsters of World War II and a lot of innocent kids from Poland who had as much desire to fight for the Germans as I did, who were conscripted against their will.”
“There are 11,600 German soldiers there in this mass grave,” he said. “We spent three days hand digging thousands of bones, and we found him. It’s an absolute miracle.”
After DNA testing confirmed Baskind’s remains, he was reinterred at Normandy American Cemetery on June 23, 2024, the 80th anniversary of his death, with full military honors and Jewish rites.
Backen spoke at the funeral, but his involvement with Operation Benjamin did not end there.
Lamm told JNS that Backen called him and, “in his perfect German accent, says, ‘Shalom, I’m doing an inspection of a World War I German military cemetery in France, and at my feet I’m staring at a headstone of Meier Levi.’”
Levi, a Jewish German soldier who died in World War I, was buried beneath a cross. “I’m going to change it,” Backen told Lamm. “There must be dozens like this.” Backen proposed that the two organizations search for other such cases.
That collaboration grew into Operation Levi, a sister initiative of the German War Graves Commission that works to identify Jewish German soldiers from World War I whose graves were incorrectly marked with crosses and replace them with Stars of David. The partnership has identified 1,307 German Jewish soldiers from World War I who were mistakenly buried beneath crosses, according to Lamm. More than 50 markers have already been replaced.
“He is one of the righteous gentiles of the world,” Lamm said of Backen. “There’s no question about it.”
Lamm also praised Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Backen’s former mentor and president of the German War Graves Commission. He described the work of Backen and others involved in Operation Levi as an effort to confront Germany’s history rather than erase or excuse it.
“It’s like I walked out of my normal mindset and entered a dreamworld of these righteous people who are looking for forgiveness, who aren’t looking to whitewash history. They just want to do the thing thing,” Lamm told JNS. “They’re not looking for absolution. They want to do the thing thing.”
Operation Benjamin’s June 1-4 mission in France focused on Jewish American and German soldiers who died during World War I’s Meuse-Argonne Offensive. On June 2, the organization replaced the markers of five American Jewish soldiers at Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. The following day, Operation Benjamin and Operation Levi replaced the markers of 12 German Jewish soldiers at Consenvoye German Military Cemetery.
At a formal dinner during the mission, organizers surprised Backen with the first Marble Star.
“He was so moved,” Lamm told JNS. “You see his head drop to his chest, just like, ‘I can’t believe this.’”
The award is “modeled after the U.S. World War II military headstone” for Jewish service members, Lamm said, adding that the honor will not be awarded annually or to donors merely for their financial support.
“It’s given for people who are just out of the box extraordinary,” he said. “He is a magnificent human being that I am privileged to call a friend.”
Lamm said Backen recently emailed him about how the project makes him feel closer to God “when he honors someone who was so betrayed by Germany.”
For Lamm, each corrected headstone is a “celebration of life-affirming kindness. It’s like the biggest privilege of a lifetime.”
“There’s a lot of purity to it,” he told JNS. “To see history being corrected is so moving.”
