Richard Sonnenfeldt, Interpreter At Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Has Died

A man who saw the horrors of Nazi concentration camps when he helped liberate the prisoners at Dachau and then went on to be the chief American interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials following World War II, has died.

Richard Sonnenfeldt was 86. His wife, Barbara, tells the Associated Press that her husband died Friday at their home in Port Washington on New York's Long Island. She attributed his death to complications of a stroke.

A German-born Jew, Sonnenfeldt served in the U.S. Army as a private during the war.

NPR's Margot Adler reports that:

His command of English and German was noticed and he became first an interpreter and later an interrogator at the trials. In later life, he became an electrical engineer and helped develop color television at RCA. He wrote a memoir, Witness to Nuremberg published in 2006. In his memoir he said that in other circumstances, many of the prisoners might be taken for ordinary men, but as he read their indictments, "I envisioned anew the stacks of pitiful corpses and gagged once again on the smell of assembly line extermination these men and their cohorts had unleashed."

Among the online resources for information about the Nuremberg trials:

— Library of Congress.

— PBS-TV's American Experience.

— Harvard Law School's Nuremberg Trials Project.

— U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Nuremberg Trials and their Legacy.