Harry M. Rosenfeld, who oversaw the two reporters who transformed a local crime story into the national Watergate corruption scandal that toppled the Nixon administration, died July 16 at his home in upstate Slingerlands, NY. He was 91.

As the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, Mr. Rosenfeld directly supervised Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they mined secretive sources in their follow-the-money unraveling of the Watergate break-in, which President Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary had described as a “third-rate burglary attempt” and which led to Mr. Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage.

An immigrant who had fled Nazi persecution in Germany as a youth, Mr. Rosenfeld joined the New York Herald Tribune as a shipping clerk, a summer job before college. In his memoir, From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman (2013), he recalled there was not a “scrivener” among his ancestors. But in his high school yearbook, he chose journalism as his dream profession. In a career that he said had been influenced by his childhood under the Nazis, he “discerned a theme underpinning much of my journalistic labors: holding to account the accountable, the more powerful the better.”