Born: Alfred Rosenfeld
Nürnberg, Germany
July 4, 1920
Fred Rodell was born in the German city of Nürnberg in 1920, the only child of a clothing manufacturer and his wife. Fred remembered growing up in a kosher and religious household. His father strictly observed the Sabbath and every Friday evening “would put on a top hat and go to the synagogue.”
Sadly, Rodell’s father died of a heart condition the year that Fred turned 11. In July 1933—only six months after Hitler’s rise to power—Rodell celebrated his bar mitzvah. Fred described how days later he had his “first experience with Nazism.” Fred was violently thrown out of a soccer game, hospitalized after being beaten to the point that “they thought I would never walk again.” A few years later, Rodell’s mother sent him to Italy for his studies. While there, Fred applied for a visa to the United States. His paperwork arrived in 1938, shortly before the fascist dictator Mussolini ordered all foreign-born Jews to leave the country.
Fred arrived in New York and worked as a restaurant porter earning $12 a week. Fred’s mother soon joined him in the city. In 1943, Fred was drafted into the U.S. military and joined an intelligence unit. He was stationed in Paris where he worked on information leaflets and radio broadcasts. Rodell was then among the troops that liberated the Dachau concentration camp. At the end of the war, Fred stayed as an interrogator for the Nuremberg trials. His cases included the prosecution of Hermann Göring as well as Nazi doctors who performed inhumane experiments on victims of the concentration camps.
After returning to the U.S., Rodell continued to work for the U.S. government before becoming an import/export consultant for foreign trade. Fred and his wife had one son.
Parents:
Leopold Rosenfeld, d. 1931
Frieda Stein Rosenfeld, survived