It was an odd, and lucky, assignment.
When he was 19, the Army tapped Harold “Hal” Bergen, a Jewish infantryman from Chicago, to work as a sound technician for the Nuremberg Trials, at which Nazi leaders faced a reckoning for atrocities committed during World War II.
Mr. Bergen checked the equipment, confirming that defendants including Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s righthand man, could hear the translation piped into their headsets.
“We went one by one, face to face, and put our hands, essentially, on their headsets, lifted them a little bit so we could hear but asking them if they could hear,” he said in an 2016 interview for StoryCorps that was conducted by his daughter Kathy Bergen, a former Chicago Tribune reporter.
Mr. Bergen likened the job to custodial work, but he also knew its importance.
“One of the things they wanted to be sure about was that the defendants could not claim the sound was not working and they were deprived of their rights,” he said in a 2016 interview with the Pritzker Military Museum.
Mr. Bergen, who grew up on the Northwest Side in Albany Park, had nightmares as a teenager that Germans would make their way to the United States and set up concentration camps.
But, as he sat in the courtroom with the accused, he found them unremarkable.
“I never felt any personal animosity toward the Nazis in front of me,” Mr. Bergen said in the interview with the military museum. “They just looked like ordinary guys. And it was hard to imagine that they did what they said they did.
“Let me tell you what I really remember, the thing that really sticks with me,” Mr. Bergen said, recalling the testimony of Nazi Adm. Alfred Jodl. “His defense was that he was being a loyal German. The one thing he said that I don’t think anybody else said was, ‘If we had won…Eisenhower would be sitting here, not me.’ Which was probably true. You lose the war, you get thrown to the lions.”
At Nuremberg, 24 of the most important Nazi military and political leaders were tried. Several received prison sentences. Three were acquitted, and 10 were hanged. Goering killed himself with poison before he could be hanged.
Asked by his daughter whether justice was served, Mr. Bergen said in the StoryCorps interview: “I think as much justice was served as was available. How much justice brings back 6 million Jews, etc.? There’s no equating. The Nuremberg trial did not stop war or mass murder or atrocities. Now, maybe there’s less than there would have been otherwise. We’ll never know…I would like to think something good came out of it.”
Mr. Bergen died from natural causes March 10. He was 97.
He didn’t talk about his service much until his daughter-in-law Sue Bergen and his daughter brought it up about it a decade ago.
“Nobody asked,” he said of his silence on the matter.
Mr. Bergen joined the Army at 18 and got radio and infantry training ahead of a planned invasion of mainland Japan that never happened that country’s leaders surrendered after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mr. Bergen arrived in Nuremberg, Germany, for the trials in April 1946 after the prosecution had presented its case.
He was there for about six months, during the defense portion of the trial.
Mr. Bergen lived a life of relative comfort in Germany. Local families did his laundry, even ironing his underwear. He ate well at the government dining hall and had time to collect German beer steins.
“It was very, very easy duty. I, to this day, feel lucky to have gotten that assignment just because life was so good,” he said in the StoryCorps interview.
Mr. Bergen was born March 24, 1927, to Ida and Charles Bergen, who lived in Lawndale, then largely Jewish, before moving north. His father drove a truck and later a cab. His mother was a homemaker and later worked as a secretary for an insurance company.
He attended Penn Elementary School and Roosevelt High School.
After the military, Mr. Bergen went to the Illinois Institute of Technology on the GI Bill and then worked in public relations, at one point heading the Chicago office of the firm Ruder Finn. His corporate clients included Miller Brewing Company and General Motors.
Mr. Bergen, whose first wife Molly Paskind Bergen died in 1974, raised his family in St. Joseph, Mich., Skokie and Highland Park. He most recently lived on the Gold Coast.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Bergen is survived by his wife Sharon Peters Bergen and son Chuck Bergen, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Services have been held.