The only member of his 5 person family to escape Germany in 1937, Stern later became a member of the Ritchie Boys, a special US military intelligence unit responsible for the interrogation of German prisoners of war and defectors. He is currently the director of The Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills (near Detroit) and one of the founders of the Lessing Society.