After spending some of his prime years aiding German concentration camp survivors and guarding Nazi leaders tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, a US second world war veteran is now believed to have become his country’s oldest known organ donor.

The story of 100-year-old Dale Steele, who died in February after a head injury led to his being placed on life support, demonstrates how donors’ health is a more important consideration than how old they are, according to Live On Nebraska, an organ-procurement organization in his home state.

“Mr Steele … is a powerful reminder that generosity has no age limit,” Live On Nebraska’s president and CEO, Kyle Herber, said in a statement.”

As Herber’s organization put it, after graduating high school and being selected in the military draft, Steele served in France, Germany, Belgium and Czechoslovakia toward the conclusion of the second world war.

His duties involved seeking out remnants of the Nazi army and helping survivors of German concentration camps return home.

Live On Nebraska detailed how Steele subsequently earned a promotion to staff sergeant and was assigned to guard imprisoned defendants at the Nuremberg trials, including convicted war criminal Hermann Göring, the Nazis’ second-in-command.

He eventually went home to Bassett, Nebraska, and wed his wife, Doris, with whom he had four children and as many grandchildren during their 72-year marriage, Live On Nebraska recounted. Steele supported his family raising cattle at their ranch, managing a farming cooperative and then selling equipment for irrigation and handling grain.

Steele sustained a head injury in February and ended up on life support, his son, Roger, told the Nebraska broadcast news outlet KMTV. Roger Steele described how Live On Nebraska at that point called him and said: “We’d like your dad to donate his liver.”

Roger Steele said he was shocked at the request and replied: “He’s over 100 years old.”

But Live On Nebraska’s chief medical officer Dr Lee Morrow explained to KMTV that donors’ livers – no matter their age – are in essence only a few years old if healthy because that particular organ has the unique ability to renew its cells throughout a lifetime.

“Your liver is about three years old; my liver is about three years old; and that 100-year-old … his liver [is] about three years old,” Morrow said to the station.

Roger Steele credited his father’s longevity and health to the physical labor he performed throughout his life, KMTV noted. He added that a staple of Dale Steele’s diet was vegetables from his own garden.

For his part, Morrow told KMTV that the application of warm blood perfusion on Dale Steele’s liver also positioned him to become – as Live On Nebraska asserted – the oldest known organ donor in the US. That technique has been used for years on donated kidneys but only more recently implemented with livers as well as other organs, in turn expanding the pool of viable donors.

The Nebraska Medicine – Nebraska Medical Center recovered Dale Steele’s liver. It was successfully transplanted a day later, with Live On Nebraska saying that procedure had provided “new life to a grateful recipient”.

A statement that Live On Nebraska attributed to Steele’s grandson, Scott, said that was as fitting a legacy as there was.

“Dale was always very helpful and considerate of everyone around him – friends and strangers alike,” Scott Steele’s statement said. “We believe he would do just about anything he could for someone in need.”