Obituary: Martin Dannenburg, US intelligence officer

Published on Monday 30 August 2010 19:59

It was April 28, 1945, and the war in Europe was in its final hours. Days earlier, Martin Dannenberg, a US Army intelligence officer, had seen piles of dead bodies at Dachau, the concentration camp in Germany. He said they were stacked like pieces of wood.

Martin Dannenberg, insurance executive and wartime intelligence officer.

Born: 5 November, 1915, in Baltimore.

Died: 19 August, 2010, in Baltimore, aged 94.

Now he was in a bank vault, opening an envelope sealed with red swastika embossments. He pulled out a document - four typed, black-bordered pages - signed by Adolf Hitler and three top lieutenants. It proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws.

These laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship; forbade marriage and sex between citizens of "German blood" and Jews; and established the swastika as the German flag while forbidding Jews to display it. Announced at a rally in Nuremberg in September 1935 and quickly rubber-stamped by the German Parliament, they provided the legal pretext for the dehumanising of Jews.

"I had the most peculiar feeling when I had this in my hand, that I should be the one who should uncover this," Dannenberg said in 1999. "Because here is this thing that begins the persecution of the Jews. And a Jewish person has found it."

Dannenberg's plunge into history - while working in counter-intelligence - started with a man staring at him from the back of a beer hall. Dannenberg asked why he was staring.

"I know the whereabouts of a document I think you Americans would like to have," the man said. "I will tell you where it is if you will see that I get to my home, which is near a town called Eichstatt."

After a convoluted trail, Dannenberg and two other agents ended up in the vault of a bank. His tale has been corroborated by written records left by the deceased interpreter who accompanied him. Dannenberg took photographs with his Minox spy camera.

He confessed that he had briefly thought about keeping the document for a souvenir, but knew it was needed for what became the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where facsimiles had to be used. After learning in 1999 that General Patton had taken the document for himself, Dannenberg referred to him as "that scoundrel". People who saw the Nuremberg Laws with Hitler's descending signature at the Skirball reported being transfixed as they imagined the horrors the crisply typed words engendered. Though thousands of copies were distributed throughout the Third Reich, the original seemed frighteningly different.

After the war Dannenberg worked for a life insurance company for more than 50 years. He was also president of Har Sinai, one of the oldest Reform Jewish congregations in the US, outside Baltimore. His first wife, the former Esther Salzman, died in 1989. He is survived by his wife, the former Margery Dopkin; a daughter, Betsy Frahm; two sons, Richard Dannenberg and Alan Eccleston; a stepdaughter, Joan Singer Consul; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.