part in World War II. After returning to Pittsburgh in 1948, he was appointed as a judge in the common pleas court, where he served until 1951. World War II In 1943, during World War II, Musmanno entered the United States Navy as a line officer assigned as a military attorney, since the navy had not yet formed its own Judge Advocate General's Corps (an action not taken until 1967). In this capacity, he eventually rose to the rank of rear admiral. He served as Allied Military Governor of the Sorrentine Peninsula in Italy. In 1946, he was appointed head of the three-person Board of Soviet Repatriation of Displaced Persons in Austria. He opposed the forcible repatriation to the Soviet Union of Cossacks and refugees, many of whom did not want to be repatriated. He was successful in aiding some of these people. Later it was learned that Stalin's government persecuted many of these returnees, condemning many to internal exile or the harsh labor camps of the gulag in Siberia, where they died. Beginning in 1947, Musmanno was presiding judge at the Einsatzgruppen trial of the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunal, held in Nuremberg for men charged with killing more than a million people behind the front lines, including Jews, Poles, and minorities. He also served as a member of the court during the military trials of Milch and Pohl. In 1961, Musmanno testified as a prosecution witness in Jerusalem in the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann. In 1948, Musmanno conducted interviews with several people who had worked closely with Adolf Hitler in the very last days of World War II, in an attempt to disprove claims of Hitler's escape despite his presumed suicide at the end of the Battle of Berlin. These interviews, conducted with the help of a simultaneous interpreter named Elisabeth Billig, served as the basis of a 1948 article Musmanno wrote for The Pittsburgh Press, as well as his 1950 book, Ten Days to Die. In both, he cites evidence that Hitler could not have survived, including the death of his right-hand man, Joseph Goebbels, the testimony of Nazi eyewitnesses who saw Hitler dead (narrating the false account of his death by a gunshot through the mouth) and Nazis who claimed Hitler used no doubles (discrediting a body double alleged to have been used to help Hitler escape), as well as a "jawbone" found by Hitler's