Richard Wolfgang Sonnenfeldt (born Heinz Wolfgang Richard Sonnenfelt), an American engineer, inventor, and chief interpreter for the U.S. prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials, was born to Jewish parents Walther and Gertrud (Liebenthal) Sonnenfeldt in Germany, where he grew up amid rising Nazi ideology. He attended a Jewish private school in Berlin and a Quaker school in England before being detained by British authorities as an enemy alien in 1940, deported to Australia, and later stranded in Bombay, India, working as a radio factory foreman. He reunited with his parents in Baltimore, Maryland, in April 1941 after their escape via Sweden, supporting them as a master electrician before being drafted into the U.S. Army, becoming a citizen, and serving in combat post-Battle of the Bulge, including entering Dachau in 1945. At age 22, his fluency in German and English led to his recruitment by General William J. Donovan for the Office of Strategic Services, where he supervised interpreters and served as chief interpreter for the U.S. prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. After leaving the Army in 1946, Sonnenfeldt studied electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, graduating first in his class. He joined RCA, leading innovations in color television that won FCC approval over CBS's standard using a single kinescope receiver, earning Sarnoff Awards in 1954 and 1961, and the 1958 RCA Award of Merit; he became an IRE fellow in 1962. His career advanced to satellite technology, industrial process controls with early computers, videodisk development (resulting in significant losses for RCA), executive vice president at NBC, roles at NAPP Systems, and deanship of a business school. He authored the memoir Witness to Nuremberg in 2006 and appeared in documentaries. Sonnenfeldt died on October 9, 2009, in Port Washington, New York, from stroke complications, leaving a legacy as an inventor with numerous patents and a key figure bridging his refugee past with American technological triumphs.