Longtime Cambridge resident and Chilmark summer resident Hans F. Loeser died May 15 at his retirement home in Canton from complications of cancer.

Hans spent many weekends and part of every summer with his family at the summer cottage he built off Flanders Lane in Chilmark in 1957. He was a founding member of the Vineyard Open Land Foundation.

Hans’s active organizing against the Viet Nam War as chairman of the Boston Lawyers’ Viet Nam Committee led to his inclusion in Richard Nixon’s infamous 1971 enemies list.

He was born in 1920 in Kassel, Germany, where his parents owned and ran a downtown department store. Fearing the rise of the Nazis, his parents sent him out of Germany in 1937 to Stoatley Rough, a school for refugees outside London. He met and fell in love with his future wife, Herta Lewent, there in 1937. Hans traveled by ship to New York in 1940 where he reunited with his parents who had barely escaped from Germany via Holland and Palestine. Mr. Loeser volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1942. He was part of the Ritchie Boy program for native German-speaking soldiers deemed especially valuable for intelligence work. Not satisfied with intelligence work alone, Hans volunteered for the 82nd Airborne Division and participated in the battles at Nijmegen and the Battle of the Bulge. In 1944 he was offered a special leave by his commanding officer to fly back to the U.K. from the battlefront to marry Herta. The honeymoon was short.

In the post war period he served as chief of section in the U.S. military government for Bavaria. In that position he was heavily involved in so-called de-nazification programs. In all their spare hours, Hans and Herta used their connections, resources and language skills to reunite families that had scattered all over the world.

In 1947 Hans and Herta settled in Cambridge.

He was accepted into Harvard Law School and graduated magna cum laude in 1950. He was proud to be one of the last students admitted to the law school without an undergraduate college degree. He always speculated that his admission was at least partially based on the strength of a letter of recommendation from his commanding general, and the fact that Hans was able to wear his full military uniform to his campus interview.

At law school he was an editor and officer of the Harvard Law Review.

After graduation Hans and Herta traveled across the U.S., considering where they would like to live, but ultimately decided Cambridge was the ideal place to settle and raise a family.

Hans joined the Boston law firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot in 1950, then a small firm of about 10 lawyers. An institution builder, he was soon given a role in the management of the firm, and eventually became a managing partner, and chairman of the firm’s executive committee. In those roles, he continued and augmented the firm’s proud tradition of hiring solely on the basis of merit, without consideration of race, creed or religion — a tradition begun at Foley long before it became the law of the land. Under his leadership, the firm grew to over 200 lawyers. Hans managed largely by example. He set high standards for himself and inspired their adoption by others. He was directly involved in hiring and then mentoring new attorneys. He was respected and beloved by numerous generations of lawyers both within and outside the firm.

His practice at Foley Hoag focused primarily on regulated industries, particularly utilities and insurance companies. He was a talented advocate and accomplished litigator. He argued numerous cases before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

His legal interests extended well beyond the business side of the firm. In the 1960s, he responded to a call from President Kennedy for greater involvement by law firms in the civil rights movement, and helped found, and later chair, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights under Law of the Boston Bar Association. Hans was directly responsible for Foley Hoag’s establishment of one of the first and most successful pro bono programs in the nation. He staunchly defended the firm’s pro bono commitment to cases as important and controversial as the representation of the plaintiffs in Boston’s school desegregation case and the representation of draft resisters during the Viet Nam War. With his unflagging support, Foley Hoag and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights successfully prosecuted the Boston School Desegregation Case. With the funds later awarded to Foley Hoag for its victory in that case, the firm established the Foley Hoag Foundation in 1980.

Since its inception, the foundation has awarded grants of over $1.5 million to over 250 local organizations. It is the only foundation in Boston to focus exclusively on the improvement of race relations.

In 1981, he helped start the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, which later became the Lawyers Alliance for World Security.

Hans served on the Boston Bar Association and the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, and was a lifelong member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the 1970s he served as honorary counsel of Senegal in Boston.

He served on many civic boards including the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, the International Student Association, the Shady Hill School, the James Jackson Putnam Center, the Cambridge Civic Association and the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts.

In 2007 he was the recipient of the Give Liberty a Hand award from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA). On the occasion of receiving the award he said of himself: “Since the day I became a citizen in 1942 I have publicly argued with my government on issues of war, nuclear arms, and civil rights. I have cherished the right to do so, as well as our fundamental values of fairness, equity and justice.”

In recent years he wrote Hans’s Story, a highly personal memoir that carries him from his life as a young Jew in between-war Germany to emigration to England and the United States, and then back to Germany with the United States Army. Details can be read at loeserbook.com.

He was an avid skier into his 80s.

A lifelong gadget and technology enthusiast, he was certainly one of the oldest early adopters of the new iPad, which he used for skyping with his grandchildren in the last weeks of his life.

He is survived by his wife of 65 years, Herta Loeser; his children Helen, Harris and Tom; eight grandchildren and his sister, Liesel Fontana.

The family asks that no flowers be sent, please.

Donations in his memory can be made to Doctors Without Borders or the Foley Hoag Foundation.