My Turn: Recovery of the Nuremberg Laws

Today marks the 67th anniversary of the recovery of the Nuremberg Laws. Lest we forget, these documents were signed into law on September 15,1935 by Hitler which made it National State policy to persecute the Jews. Though comprising less than 1 percent of the German population, the Jews were vilified as the source of most of the country's economic and other crises. The following is the never before published story by one of the WWII soldiers involved in the recovery, Sgt. Seymour Golub, as told to his family prior to his death on Nov. 15, 1997.

On April 28, 1945 two members of the 2949th Engineer Technical Team (ETIT) were on a special assignment assisting the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corp, (C.I.C.) in the recovery of Nazi documents before they could be destroyed by the Germans.

The 2949th ETIT was described in the October 5, 1945 edition of the Fort Jackson Journal, Fort Jackson, S.C.,  as “an esoteric four man team responsible for collecting enemy engineering equipment, finding out how it worked, and dreaming up methods of how best to combat it.”

Each man on the team was a specialist. Capt. Roger Crowley, Tulsa, Okla. was the officer in command. Master Sgt. Arthur Shriever, Cleveland, Ohio was a master mechanic and maintained the unit’s jeeps.

Sgt. Ruebin Perner, later of Mercer Island, Wash., of German heritage grew up as a farm boy in North Dakota and translated German documents. Finally Sgt. Seymour Golub, later of Hayden, Idaho, but formerly of Brooklyn, N.Y., was the enemy mine and booby trap specialist and illustrator of all German explosive devices. Sgt. Golub during his tour of service personally disarmed over 2000 devices and was himself a demolition expert.

The 2949th ETIT was attached to the XII Corps, U.S. Army Third Army which under the command of Gen. George S. Patton moved swiftly through Western Europe.

This brings us to April 28, 1945.

As the Third Army crossed the Mosel River into Germany, the German Military High Command worked desperately to destroy as many incriminating documents as they could. Those documents which could not be immediately destroyed, before the arrival of the advancing U.S. Army, were hidden in safes, primarily in banks, bunkers and municipal buildings. The U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corp, (C.I.C., the predecessor of the C.I.A), was determined to capture as much incriminating data before it was destroyed and lost forever.

By mid-March, 1945, Sgt. Golub began a covert assignment assisting the C.I.C. by blowing open safes potentially containing Nazi documents. Sgt. Golub was one of only a select few capable of achieving this goal. Anyone could blow open a safe given enough explosives, however to blow open a door without destroying, scorching or scattering the contents required the greatest skill and artistry which Sgt. Golub possessed.

Sgt. Golub worked under the direction of three C.I.C. agents, a Sgt. Dannenberg, a Mr. Perls and a Mr. Pickens. He also worked with his best friend Sgt. Rueben Perner, the 2949th ETIT’s translator.

On April 28, 1945, on that day’s mission in Eichstaett, Germany, Sgt. Golub was directed by the C.I.C. agents into an inner room in a bank building with bookshelves on all four walls loaded with books and a large floor vault in the center. Sgt. Golub using his explosive of choice, plastic or C4 as it is known today, placed a 5 mm bead around the periphery of the door, attached his detonator, set his fuse and exited the room to a safe position. Moments later after the explosion he re-entered the room. The door was ajar ever so slightly. Adding additional C4 around the massive hinges and select pressure points, Sgt. Golub again attached a second detonator, set a second fuse and exited the room.

This time, after the second blast, all the books were off the shelves and scattered on the floor. A single pool table-like lighting fixture swung wildly overhead. The door on the safe was blasted cleanly off yet all the inner contents lay intact and free of any fire damage.

Sgt. Perner was initially able to translate some of the documents in the safe which he and Sgt. Golub turned over to Sgt. Dannenberg and Mr. Perls. The safe Sgt. Golub blew in Eichstaett contained original copies of the Nuremberg Laws signed by Adolf Hitler.

Grasping the magnitude of their find, the C.I.C. agents later turned the historical papers over to the General Staff who sent them to Gen. George S. Patton, Commanding Officer. Being a neighbor and close friend of Mr. Huntington, Gen. Patton later shipped the documents home to Pasadena, Calif., to the Huntington Library. The Nuremberg Laws were on loan and display from the Huntington Library to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and in 2010 sent to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

For 67 years this has been an untold story. How two days before Hitler committed suicide, two American soldiers, barely 21 years old, one a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, N.Y. and the other, a German farm boy from North Dakota; one boy who coolly worked with things that explode, the other who could translate German into English, saved the Nuremberg Laws to be remembered and studied by future generations.

One last chilling fact was that the bank was protected by imbedded explosives attached to a 21-day German timing device, a J-Feder 44, set to detonate on April 29, 1945. This device was disarmed and the explosives removed by Sgt. Golub prior to the vault opening. Had the American soldiers entered the bank one day later, they all would have been killed and the Nuremberg Laws perhaps never found.

Alan Golub is a resident of Hayden.