Using his training experience as justification, Marcus tried to talk the Army into giving him a field command with a Ranger unit, but he was unsuccessful. In the spring of 1943, Marcus was posted back to the Pentagon to become chief of planning for the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division (CAD), headed by Maj. Gen. John H. Hilldring. For most of the rest of the war, Marcus, now a full colonel, found himself on a whirlwind tour of the corridors of power.

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While at CAD, Marcus served as a legal and military government adviser at some of the war’s most important Allied conferences. Those included Cairo in November 1943; Dumbarton Oaks, where the United Nations was born; and Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, where the postwar world order was forged. According to the citation for his Distinguished Service Medal (an unusually high service decoration for a colonel), Marcus played a key role in the ‘negotiation and drafting of the Italian Surrender Instrument, the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender of Germany, and the international machinery to be used for the control of Germany after her total defeat.’

Although locked into a general staff job, Marcus did figure out a way to make one trip to the front lines. In early May 1944, he convinced Hilldring to send him to London on temporary duty ‘to provide liaison and act as observer in the implementation of military government policies for France.’ At first Hilldring was pleased because Marcus managed to answer on the spot most of the civil affairs questions that usually wound up at the Pentagon. Then, in the second week of June, Hilldring realized that he had not heard from Marcus since the end of May. After a few transatlantic phone calls, Hilldring learned from Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith that Marcus was’somewhere in France,’ having jumped on D-Day, June 6, with the 101st Airborne Division.

Marcus used a very elastic interpretation of his orders from Hilldring, combined with the fact that he had been a fellow cadet at West Point with the 101st’s commander, Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor (class of 1922), to get himself on a Curtiss C-46 in the first wave. Of all the soldiers who jumped with the 101st that day, only Marcus and one other had never jumped before.

Once on the ground in Normandy, Marcus collected groups of the widely scattered paratroopers and organized them into patrols. He led several of those patrols himself, engaging in firefights with German units and, on one occasion, freeing a group of captured U.S. paratroopers. As the 101st regrouped over the next few days, Marcus finally bumped into Taylor, who asked him, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Marcus characteristically replied, ‘Oh, just looking around.’ Back in Washington, a frustrated Hilldring finally had to issue the order: ‘Find Marcus. Arrest him if you have to–but send him back!’ Shortly after that, Marcus was on a plane to the United States, still in his dirty field uniform.

Immediately after the end of the fighting in Europe, General Lucius D. Clay, commander of U.S. occupation forces in Germany, requested that Marcus be assigned to his staff. Clay’s standing instructions at the time were that all senior officers in Germany were to visit the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp. As a civil affairs officer, Marcus was well-acquainted with Nazi wartime atrocities. But even that knowledge did not prepare him for the horrors he saw at Dachau. He had never been a Zionist, but now he started to rethink his position on a future Jewish state.

During his tour in Germany, Marcus served as executive for internal affairs of the U.S. Group Control Council, then its acting chief of staff, and then the U.S. secretary general in occupied Berlin. Much of his time and energy was devoted to improving conditions for the vast numbers of displaced persons in Europe. Despite his anger over Nazi treatment of the Jews, at a White House conference Marcus argued strongly against adopting the drastic Morganthau Plan, which would have reduced postwar Germany to an agricultural state–one vast farmland.

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