the Jewish population of Ukraine massacred some 50,000 people in Vinnytsia, where Cherniss's father was born. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In April 1942, Cherniss gave the Sather Lectures at Berkeley and soon afterwards volunteered for military service. He entered the United States Army as a private and was abroad by November 1942, where he worked in military intelligence. He was assigned to a British intelligence unit in England, France and Belgium, and rose to the rank of captain in three years. According to George Watt, Cherniss was working in Belgium immediately after the war and sought information from Aline Dumon (nicknamed "Michou"), who won medals for her clandestine work in the so-called Comet Line resistance network. Cherniss was seeking a young man who had betrayed scores in the Belgian and French undergrounds to the German occupation. In a 1985 interview, she remembered: After the war, … Lt. Harold Cherniss, the American intelligence officer, telephoned me and said "Michou, you must come quickly." I went to Harold's office and he showed me twelve little pictures of identity cards and asked "Do you know that boy?" I said "Yes, [that's him] …" He said, "Michou, this is very important. Please look carefully." I said "No problem… [that's] the same boy." He laughed. I said "What happened, Harold?" "That boy is working for the Americans in Nuremburg." But not for long… [The boy] was tried and executed at Lille in 1945. Cold War anxiety at Berkeley In 1946, while still in Europe, Cherniss accepted an offer to return to Berkeley as a Professor of Greek. With the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949 and the Communist victory in China and first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, America and Berkeley were soon caught up in Cold War tensions. In the rising anxiety stoked by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, fears grew that communists were infiltrating American universities. These were acute at Berkeley where the Radiation Laboratory situated in the hills above campus had been heavily involved in developing the atomic bomb. In September 1949, McCarthy's committee commenced a hearing on alleged communist infiltration of the "Rad Lab." The University of California soon began requiring its faculty to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath. As these tensions mounted, Cherniss accepted an offer from the Institute of Advanced Study and resigned from his post at Berkeley: "his tenure there was cut