SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Since 1944, loved ones of a 27-year-old Marine from Salt Lake City, believed that he had been killed and lost at sea during World War II.
In December 2025, all of that changed when they were informed that his remains had been accounted for on Oct. 9, 2025. Marine Corps Reserve Pfc. Helmut F. Behlert, 27, was killed in action on the first day of the Island of Saipan, but his body was never recovered, leaving his loved ones without closure.
After the war ended, the American Graves Registration Service recovered remains designated as Unknown X-40 from the 4th Marine Division Cemetery in Saipan. The remains were disinterred in December 2022 and sent to the DPAA Laboratory for analysis.
Salt Lake City Marine killed in WWII accounted for after 77 years
Gregory Berg, a forensic anthropologist and laboratory manager at DPAA, was one of the people working to make identification on Behlert. Though DPAA has a variety of techniques in their arsenal, Berg said that a DNA match was crucial in Behlert’s identification.
“If we didn’t have a private first-class Bellert’s family to compare to, we would have never made an identification,” Berg said. “We were very lucky in that they came forward and donated their family reference sample to DPAA and to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory to further this case along.”…